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Kurt Vonnegut

I listened to Slaughterhouse 5 as an audiobook, and I thought it was okay... it was only later when I properly read it that I actually enjoyed it. The narrator on the tape was horribly boring and spoke far too slowly. I've been looking for more of his books ever since, but they seem to be hard to find in my parts. My Uni library only has Cat's Cradle, and, of course, someone had to go and lose that.
 
beer good said:
5 years after his death, Vonnegut scores another bestseller:

Newly published Kurt Vonnegut novella tops ebook charts | Books | guardian.co.uk
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Read it.

Basic Training was supposedly written "in the late 1940s", which means it predates the short stories in Bagombo Snuff Box by a few years, Sirens of Titan by 10, and Slaughterhouse-Five by 20. And yeah, it shows. If you know what to look for, there are some things here that clue you in that Vonnegut wrote this story of a sensitive young man sent to live on a farm with his cousins and their father The General; the powerless boy hero tossed about by life, the casual cruelty of war (The General, all boisterous pride and blind adherence to The Rules, is definitely a sketch for many later Vonnegut characters)... Ultimately, though, it's really a rather weak affair; Vonnegut's prose at this stage is often painfully clichéd, as is the story itself, with an ending depending entirely on both the characters and the reader having forgotten something that was established only 10-odd pages earlier. Above all, what's missing is Vonnegut's irony; at this point (as readers of Magombo Snuff Box already know) he hadn't yet figured out that stories can wink at the reader, that a moral can be subverted, that "And then they lived happily ever after" is, in most cases, a horrible ending. He'd get that a few years later, and no doubt that's one of the reasons he shoved Basic Training back in the drawer and never revisited it.

:star2:
 
You can read this instead:

Letters of Note: I am very real

In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate.

On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn't receive a reply.
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That was an eloquent bitch slap to McCarthy.

I think of all the Vonnegut I have read, Cat's Cradle was my favorite.
 
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Yeah, whatever... Random things / Extremely Silly Photos of Extremely Serious Writers #10/15 Tom Wolfe and Kurt Vonnegut playing lifeguards.
 
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