Far and away the best book ever written about WWI. Better than All Quiet on the Western Front or Goodbye to All That or any of the other classics. But that’s the problem–WWI was awful, perhaps the most awful thing of the 20th century. And this book is forgotten precisely because it portrays the war and its pointlessness too realistically. We want to know, but we don’t really want to know.

Some other novels I like: Civil War Stories by Ambrose Bierce (Amazon), Company K by William March (Amazon) and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (Amazon).