I finished reading Breakfast of Champions, which is a deeply sad book. Wiki describes it as satire. I suppose there’s some humor here, but in general what I find is a well of despair. I have to give it two thumbs up for just how painfully despairing Vonnegut was able to make it. It is populated with characters who are filled with “bad chemicals” and who lack free will. Here’s a snippet:

“Listen: Bunny’s mother and my mother were different sorts of human beings, but they were both beautiful in exotic ways, and they both boiled over with chaotic talk about love and peace and wars and evil and desperation, of better days coming by and by, of worse days coming by and by. And both our mothers committed suicide. Bunny’s mother ate Drāno. My mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn’t nearly as horrible.”

And so on.

Last week, Kurt Vonnegut died. I’m reading Breakfast of Champions in memoriam.

I really want to like his work. I’ve read a couple of his books: Galápagos and Slaughterhouse-Five, with mixed results. I’m giving him another whirl.

Interesting exploration of the relationship of author to his creations, as well as the usual, brilliant Vonnegut satire.

Got it off the iTunes Music Store to listen to during post-wisdom teeth removal… what a great book.. I’d read it ages ago, and Stanley Tucci does it justice in the audio format.

Funny, scintillating, and warped beyond imagining.

A hilarious and perceptive exploration of that age-old question: Am I a robot?

Oddly linear for Vonnegut, but explaining 70s America as if to a far future generation with no cultural context is quite glorious.