Vonne Gut Reactions: Timequake

Ting-a-ling...

I recently completed my quest to read and review all of Kurt Vonnegut's fourteen novels, a task I had originally set for myself during school year 2012-13 and which I completed in the summer of 2015.

And so it goes.

First, let me point out that Timequake was the least fictional of Vonnegut's novels. He offers up the following in the book's introduction after speaking about Hemingway and he last novels, his fish, as it were...My great big fish, which stunk so, was entitled Timequake. Let us think of it as Timequake One. And let us think of this one, a stew made from its best parts mixed with thoughts and experiences during the past seven months or so, as Timequake Two.

Hokay?

And that's a fairly apt description of the Timequake that I held in my hands. It's not a linear story, but it does contain parts of a linear story. It also contains what might be called essay fragments written from Vonnegut's point of view that aren't any part of the story, that only sometimes relate to the story, and that are told directly to the readers without any pretense of inclusion in a fictional narrative.

This is, in the end, the purest of Vonnegut. He includes Kilgore Trout - offers a far more sympathetic salute to the man than he did when the character first met his author and alter ego in Breakfast of Champions - and the Tralfamadorians. He offers up his viewpoints sometimes couched in fiction but quite often without the thinnest of veils that Vonnegut has offered us through the course of his writing. Vonnegut even gives us a sketch of Trout, himself, as shown above.

Here Kurt - it feels wrong to call him by his first name, he's too big for that, too massive in my head - Vonnegut is saying good bye and possibly realizing that he doesn't have another novel in him any more. The book was published in 1997, and though Vonnegut would live another decade, he never published anything more that would be called a novel.

To my notes...

• dedication - "All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental." This is a sentiment that has been espoused by Vonnegut in many of his books: that we are here entirely by luck. Some of his characters are crippled by this, and others are freed. It's all in your attitude, I guess.
• p5 - "Human rights? What could be more indifferent to the rights of any form of life than an H-bomb?" - Another common Vonnegut thought: that weapons of war are indifferent to who they are killing. This leads to the just and the unjust being endangered just alike.
• p10 - "I made sandwiches of German soldiers between an erupting Earth and an exploding sky, and in a blizzard of razor blades." - Vonnegut has frequently described horrific acts in odd, uncommon descriptions. Here Trout is describing what he did during World War II and how he viewed those acts.
• p11 - "If I had it to do all over again, I would choose to be born again in a hospital in Indianapolis. I would choose to spend my childhood again at 4365 North Illinois Street, about ten blocks from here, and to again be a product of that city's public schools." - Vonnegut goes on to describe how he would live his life exactly as he had the first time. He doesn't think that doing things any differently would have made him any happier. 
• p12 - "If this isn't nice, what is?" - One of Vonnegut's most famous lines...
• p16 - The Booboolings (from another planet) have a 'weird' custom through which they talk to their offspring and explain how they should act, how they should feel, how they should believe. The Booboolings even make their youngsters read books and explain how they should feel about the situations therein. - Yup, Vonnegut observing his world and explaining it from the perspective of an alien.
• p18 - The Booboolings stop this custom when television is introduced. Instead of needing to divert themselves and their children from boredom (as they did with the books), they simply sit and watch televisions..."and automobiles and computers and barbed wire and flamethrowers and land mines and machine guns and so on." - Technology hasn't made our world any better in Vonnegut's eyes.
• p19 - "The moral at the end of that story is this: 'Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.' "- Yeah, Vonnegut doesn't have the most positive image of women.
• p23 - "My great-grandfather Peter Lieber...was a Freethinker, which is to say a skeptic about conventional religious beliefs...as would be Kilgore Trout and I." - Vonnegut is long-known to be an areligious man. That comes up again later in the book again.
• p28 - "The late British philosopher Bertrand Russell said he lost friends to one of three addictions: alcohol or religion or chess." - I don't know that chess is a major addiction that I can think of, but the inclusion of religion there again echoes Vonnegut's areligious status.
• p30 - "in Timequake One...by the year 2000, [writers] had become 'as quaint', in the opinion of the general public, 'as contemporary makers in New England tourist towns of the toy windmills known since colonial times as whirligigs." - Again, echoing the Booboolings, Vonnegut thinks that writers have become obsolete since the invention of television, and I don't think he believes that's a positive thing.
• p43 - Tralfamadore makes another, final appearance. This time it's as a planet where 'representatives of all the chemical elements held a meeting...to protest some of their members' having been incorporated into the bodies of big, sloppy, stinky organisms as cruel and stupid as human beings." - It's actually a fascinating idea, and I would very much read the story, maybe even use it in class. It's not a short story that is developed beyond the sketch stage as are so many of Trout's short stories.
• p44 - In the short story of the elements' conference, "Sulfur...made a motion that all chemicals involved in medical research combine wherever possible to create ever more powerful antibiotics. These in turn would cause disease organisms to evolve new strains that were resistant to them." - We've seen the idea of antibiotics leading to stronger diseases, though there they were tests from the Tralfamadorians to make better space travelers (the diseases). Clearly the idea of antibiotic-lead evolution was an idea that stuck with Vonnegut.
• p46 - From Trout's memoir of the timequake, My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot, "Listen, if it isn't a timequake dragging us through knothole after knothole, it's something just as mean and powerful." - In spite of Vonnegut's famous quote about how nice this is, he really does espouse the belief that much of life is suffering, that life is generally a horrible time.
• p51 - Here is the joke to which I linked at the very top. It's dirty, I warn you, but it's a great example of Vonnegut's characters making tragedy into dark humor.
• p56 - Vonnegut offers this quote from his sister Allie, "If there is a God, He sure hates people. That's all I can say" - Vonnegut saw some pretty awful things in his life - suicide, war, hatred - and that (or something) left him pretty skeptical about God and how He could create a world such as this.
• p57 - "For anybody who could believe in God, as you once did, it would be a piece of cake to believe in the plant BooBoo." - See, believing in God is like believing in a ridiculous, fictional story.
• p63 - Trout here, not Vonnegut, "If I'd wasted my time creating [three-dimensional] characters," Trout said, "I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in." - Yeah, that's Vonnegut as Trout right there.
• p68 - Vonnegut's three favorite quotes...
  • A friend, Ted Adler, had rebuilt an ell for Vonnegut and at the end stepped back in shock and said, "How the hell did I do that?" because it was too well done for his understanding.
  • "The second is Jesus Christ's 'Who is it they say I am?' "
  • "The third is from my son Mark, pediatrician and watercolorist and sax player. I've already quoted him in another book: 'We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.' "
  • That about sums up Vonnegut's thoughts on the world...shock at beauty...skepticism and irreverence at religion...be kind to each other because the world's hard enough.
• p71 - Hitler's last words, according to a short story by Kilgore Trout: "I never asked to be born in the first place." - see the dedication...we're here randomly.

• p81 - Vonnegut is describing Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms as his nephew sees it, "he was close to tears because he had to read, having been forced to do so by a professor, A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway." Vonnegut recaps the novel and says thusly, "The tears Hemingway has made you want to shed are tears of relief! It looked like the guy was going to have to get married and settle down. But then he didn't have to [because she and the baby died]. Whew! What a close shave!" - Wow, Vonnegut on marriage.
• p93 - From Trout's My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot again, "I didn't need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of [poop]. I already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books." - Yup, a ray of sunshine, our little Kurt.
• p104 - Discussing Isaac Newton's brain, "And well might any educated person excrete a sizable chunk of masonry when contemplating the tremendously truthful ideas this ordinary mortal, seemingly, uttered with no more to go by, as far as we know, than signals from his dog's breakfast [Vonnegut's description of a brain] from his three and a half pounds of blood soaked sponge. This one naked ape invented differential calculus! He invented the reflecting telescope! He discovered and explained how a prism breaks a beam of sunlight into its constituent colors! He detected and wrote down previously unknown laws governing motion and gravity and optics!" - Yeah, Newton is the bomb, but Vonnegut's description of all these idea (positive here, far more negative in the Booboolings) coming from a dog's breakfast, three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge is appropriate.
• p117 - Jane, Vonnegut's first wife, died a believer in God, an Episcopalian after having been raised a Quaker. "She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I loved her." Earlier, on page 73, Vonnegut mourned for his "buddy Bernard V. O'Hare, now dead, [who] lost his faith as a Roma Catholic during World War Two. I didn't like that. I thought that was too much to lose." - Vonnegut himself never had faith (he says as much in the next paragraph on page 74). He is happy for those who have faith and sad for those who lose it. That's really interesting.
• p139 - "In real life, as during  a rerun following a timequake, people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize." - Man, that's dark.
• p152 - Vonnegut proposes two amendments to the Constitution, "Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage." - Those are pretty liberal ideas there, Kurt. I wish they could come true, too.
• p162 - "[T]he British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin's theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747." - Not quite...more like believing a hurricane - given a billion chances - could put two parts together. Once those are put together and stay together better than they do separately, a billion more hurricanes will put a third part together. Repeat until a plane exists.
• p169 - " I had to add, though, that I knew of a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki." - Vonnegut has repeatedly said that the bombing of Hiroshima can be defended (he won't, but it can be) but that Nagasaki's can't be.
• p183 - One of my favorite foreign phrases, "Esprit de l'escalier!" and Vonnegut never explains it, so I won't either. I love that phrase.
• p191 - The Girl got to hear Vonnegut speak at Indiana University once. She related to me a story that he told there about a postal worker woman with whom he was secretly - even from her - in love. Here he tells that same story. It's beautiful.
• p202 - Vonnegut quotes from Abe Lincoln in Illinois: a play in three acts and includes a large passage from Lincoln. I quote a short part of that, "I have heard of an eastern monarch who once charged his wise man to invent him a sentence which would be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, 'And this too shall pass away.' " - I'm actually kind of surprised that Vonnegut didn't ever use that phrase as one of his books' choruses. 
• p211 -

  "I got a sappy letter from a woman a while back. She knew I was sappy, too, which is to say a northern Democrat. She was pregnant, and she wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby into a world this bad.
  
  I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably. They turned up in the most unexpected places. Perhaps you, dear reader, are or can become a saint for her sweet child to meet.
  
  I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!

  Vonnegut is just a walking contradiction - believing that the world is horrible, that the people in it do horrible things to each other, but also that there are saints.
• p216 - Vonnegut tells a story about a letter that he wrote once and anonymously to his uncle about his brother. It's too long to relate here (read it on Google Books if you want to). It made me laugh out loud.

Vonnegut ends the book in very touching fashion.

I'm thrilled that Kurt wrote such a wonderful and beautiful and meandering and personal final novel.

I thank him digitally.

And I am thrilled that he was here to make our world - my world, especially - a much better place.

Consumerism for a good cause

The Friends of the Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (who desperately need a better, shorter name) are currently holding their annual, biggest book sale (which really means books, DVDs, CDs, and probably antiquated cassettes and video tapes) at the downtown branch, the coolest library branch in the city.

The sale goes through this Friday, and all proceeds go to supporting the best library in the country.

Humble Bundle...a humble bargain

Go and buy the Humble Bundle right now.

For about twenty bucks, you can get the entire Locke and Key series (digital format, not print), one of the absolute best series in the past decade.

And that's only six of the more than sixteen collected editions (including Alan Moore's full Nemo series) that you'll get.

Seriously, go...buy...it...now.

Vonne Gut Reactions: Hocus Pocus

It's been a long while since I last reviewed one of Kurt Vonnegut's books, stopping a book and a half short of finishing his main fourteen novels. From there, maybe it'll be on to his collections, maybe not.

If Hocus Pocus is any indication, though, we are far from Vonnegut's prime, and it would be seven more years until he published his final novel, Timequake. From 1959 through 1990 - when Hocus Pocus was published - Vonnegut published a new novel every two to four years. After 1990 Vonnegut had only one more novel in him, and that one came out in 1997.

Here's to hoping that Kurt went out in a blaze of glory, because Hocus Pocus isn't that. (All page numbers refer to the edition seen above, that with the two white hands around a view of a park.)

• p44 - Our main character, Eugene Debs Hartke, find time and again that his life is influenced by chance. Here Hartke bumps into Sam Wakefield, a military recruiter, entirely by chance. His life's path - on to art school before the meeting - is forever changed. Vonnegut often wrote of chance having a much larger influence on our lives than most people would care to admit.
• p67 - Hartke meets Alton Darwin, a mass murderer in the prison where he would eventually work. He compares himself to Darwin thusly, "He hadn't killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn't had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government. Also he had done all his killing for reasons of money. I had never stopped to that."
• p117 - "A normal tour of duty in Vietnam was twice [6 months] and 1,000 times more dangerous. Who could blame the educated classes with political connections for staying home?" - Vonnegut wrote a number of times that the wealthy didn't have to send their children to war, that wars were fought on the backs of the poor.

• p137  - "He was a cuckold in the present, and crucifixion awaited him in the future." We've seen a number of Vonnegut characters described in a similar way, who they are and who they will be at the same time.
• p137 - Hartke reads a 'remarkable science fiction story" called "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore." It's been far too long since I've heard anything about Tralfamadore.
• p143 - Really, people were debating the realities of climate change as Vonnegut wrote this, too? Sheesh...
• p154 - I think this is the only time that the phrase "hocus pocus" is mentioned in the book. "then my list of those whose lives I took shouldn't include possibles and probables, or those killed by artillery or air strikes called in by me, and surely not all those, many of them Americans, who dies as an indirect result of all my hocus pocus, all my blah blah blah."
• p155 - Hartke is making a list of all the people he killed and women he slept with while he is in prison awaiting his trial for murders and kidnappings after the prison break. His lawyer asks him why. Hartke says, "To speed things up on Judgement Day."...his lawyer replies, "I thought you were an Atheist."...Hartke replies, "You never know." Vonnegut was a renowned Atheist, but he always held open the possibility that he might've been wrong.

• p163 - The phrase "what's the hurry, son?" is repeated three times. Each time, it pulls Hartke into a totally different pathway in the world. Again, random chance, but this time with an echo throughout time.
• p166 - A character relates a childhood story of being trapped in an elevator. He was panicked, but he assumed that the adults outside the elevator were focusing on this major event in American history, that even the President of the United States was being updated. Because of this, when the elevator doors opened, he assumed there would be a huge uproar when the doors opened. And there wasn't. There was nothing. Hartke asks, "You know what you have described to perfection?"..."What it was like to come home from the Vietnam War."
• p176 - Vonnegut mentions the towns of Cairo, Illinois. Only, "he pronounced it 'kay-roe.' "...and Peru, Indiana pronounced "pee-roo" not "puh-roo"...and Brazil, Indiana being said as 'brazzle.' I know all of those towns...and Versailles, Indiana - ver-sales.
• p185 - "I have looked up who the Freethinkers were...who believed...that nothing but sleep awaited good and evil persons alike in the Afterlife, that science had proved all organized religions to be baloney, that God was unknowable, and that the greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community." - that sounds a whole lot like Vonnegut's humanism.

• p200 - "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore" explains that the Earth was created in order to improve the space-travel-readiness of bacteria from Earth and that the words of the Bible were written down from those same alien bacterial engineers. That's about right for Vonnegut's beliefs about organized religion.
• p238 - A Japanese man is discussing the parallels between war and commerce. "So now we count dollars the way you used to count bodies. What does that bring us closer to? What does it mean? We should do with those dollars what you did with the bodies. Bury and forget them! You were luckier with your bodies than we are with all our dollars." - Vonnegut has long had a disdain for commercialism.
• p242 - "I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today." - Yup, vintage Vonnegut right there. The wealthy are running our world. The rest of us are at their whims.
• p251 - Vonnegut relates the story of "a talking deer in the National Forest...who gets tangled in barbed wire during the summer months, trying to get at the delicious food on the farms. He is shot by a hunter. As he dies he wonders why he was born in the first place. The final sentence of the story was the last thing the deer said on Earth. The hunter was close enough to hear it and was amazed. This was it: 'What the blakety-blank was that supposed to be all about?' " Yup, Vonnegut.

The whole story, honestly feels like Vonnegut-by-numbers. All of the beats are there, even the occasionally humorous beats.

But the book feels flat, empty, like not much of anything.

The story of Eugene Debs Hartke isn't interesting. He seems to bop from pillar to post, to deal with women either as someone to sleep with (the majority of women) or to take care of (his wife and mother-in-law), and to drift from one job to another without any care or control of what he wants to do.

He seems a passive participant in his own story. Meh...

Hopefully I'll get something better from Timequake. 

Need a good read?

The vast majority of my reading is done in the graphic novel world.

With that being said, I do understand that there are a whole lot more books that can be read.

If you're looking for some good reads, you could probably do a whole lot worse than trying some books from NPR's best books of 2014 (sortable by tag).

A whole lot of comics and one crappy Lego book

Really good things I've read lately

• Flash: Rogues Revolution (vol 2) and Gorilla Warfare (vol 3) (new 52) - The relaunch of Flash is working really well. I dig the artwork; I dig the change of romantic interest from Iris Allen to Patty Spivot, a crime scene investigator and Barry Allen's professional equal. I dig the redesign of the Glider from stupid, golden skater to mostly intangible astral projection. I dig the idea of Speed Force as being a weird dimension.
  
  I really, really dig the artwork.
  
  Sadly I couldn't read the first volume as the library copy I checked out had a bunch of pages ripped out. Stupid teenagers

Good things I've read lately

• Action Comics: Superman and the Men of Steel (vol 1), Bulletproof (vol 2), and At the End of Days (vol 3) (new 52) - I haven't been a huge fan of Grant Morrison's writing, finding Batman (Black Glove, et al) and Final Crisis needlessly complicated, hard to follow, and difficult to understand. There are time-jumps a plenty, multidimensional villains, and attacks that aren't even remotely what they appear to be. These stories work only on the very, very long term, rewarding readers for paying attention to and remembering story breadcrumbs laid down years previously.
  
  Here, it actually kind of works. Admittedly, though, the three-volume storyline is far greater than the individual issue parts are on their own. In fact, at times, the individual issues were somewhat confusing, jumping from past to future, new 52 universe to an Earth-23's President Black Superman. In the end, though, Morrison actually brings things together to a satisfying wrap-up.
• Invincible Ultimate Collection Volume 9 -  Admittedly, there's a bit of save-the-world fatigue at this point in Invincible because the world has been nearly destroyed dozens and dozens of times, the Viltrumites have fought again and again, and Mark has been left for dead dozens of times.
  
  But it just keeps working.
  
  Every time I think the series's gone too far, I keep wanting to read more. The cliffhanger at the end of this volume - with Mark trapped in another dimension - has me biting my nails again. Nice job, Kirkman.
• Fairest: Of Men and Mice - Cinderella takes the series for a run here with something that certainly would have fit in tidely in the main series. In fact, much of the storyline ties in neatly to the building tension of the main series's impending wrap-up as we find in the end that a plot set into running by Brandish (now trying to redeem himself in Rose Red's army of hope) is nearly seen to fruition by an Leigh who ends this volume practically laughing maniacally and rubbing her hands together.
  
  The actual plot sees Cindy quelling an assassination attempt against her and Snow White, attempts involving hundreds of rat-human hybrids of varying levels of ratness and humanness (yes, humanness, shut up). The plotline wraps up neatly enough and isn't much more than an unnecessary sideline from the main series's continuing march toward the inevitable. Let's get back to the main tale, shall we?
• X-Men Legacy (vol 1-4) - This exploration of Legion (Prof X's son) mental illness and attempts to right his world and control his powers is surprisingly interesting. Definitely worth a try.

Passable things I've read lately

• How to Fake a Moon Landing -  I really wanted to like this one. It's a graphic novel/comic book/picture story that points out that science disbelievers are misguided. The book tackles moon landing disbelievers, autism-vaccine linkers, homeopath purveyors, and all sorts of other mistaken folks.
  
  I wanted to like it, but I just didn't. It's too one-note, too pedantic, lacking any subtlety whatsoever. Maybe younger readers might be more willing to read through this lack of subtlety, but I only made it through about half the book before I sent it back to PLCH.
• Batgirl: Knightfall Descends (vol 2) and Death of the Family (vol 3) (new 52) - First off, I was embarrassed to even pick up vol Knightfall Descends because of the horrible cover. Apparently the artist was trying to come up with a horrifically sexist cover showing off Batgirl's apparently massive quads and a spandex-covered view of the holiest of holies. I couldn't carry the comic around without covering it up with another book. Good lord, folks. (Check out the image to the right there...click to make it larger)
  
  The continued exploration of the after effects of Barbara Gordon's shooting and temporary paralysis at the hands of the Joker (in the still kind of in-continuity Killing Joke) is an interesting and likely necessary choice if they're going to keep Barbara Gordon's past in continuity. The girl Talon, continuing the Court of Owls crossover is happily passed by quickly. The weird, girl version of Jean-Paul Valley/Azrael named Knightfall here (referencing the broken-back storyline from the old 52) comes next...meh. The best part of the Batgirl series so far has been the search of Batgirl to find independence, finding her own apartment, making a new friend with her roommate. The villains here are forgettable.
  
  Then comes the crapfest that is Death of the Family. CRAPfest...the face ripped off and stapled back on Joker is a whole bunch of horrible ideas, as is the 'Joker wants to marry Batgirl'. Even worse is the introduction of Barbara's brother James, Jr as a horribly psychotic, disastrous badguy who knows Barbara is Batgirl. Bad, bad, bad idea and execution.
• Superman: Fury at World's End (new 52) - Meh...Superman and Wonder Woman hide their relationship from fellow heroes...the biggest threat (another Kryptonian but with super science ability and superpowers that Superman and Supergirl don't have) ever to Earth to the whole solar system EVER...zzzzz
  
  Yes, the sight of Clark Kent talking to Lois Lane while thinking about Wonder Woman followed immediately with Supergirl barging into Clark's apartment - which Lois dismisses as Clark doing 'blog interviews with comely cosplayers.'
  
  And the entertaining prison traps built around Lex Luthor - traps which only Superman can break through when he needs to talk to Luthor - are pretty fun.
  
  But the actual plotline isn't very interesting.

Awful things I've read lately

• Brick Flicks -  Good lord is this stupid. It's a collection of film photos or posters recreated in the medium of Lego. There is almost no Lego-related information - no discussion of the Lego techniques involved, a very few wordless photography building instructions (which alternate between ridiculously, pointlessly simplistic and ridiculously hard to follow due to the gigantic jumps made between steps), just a few paragraphs of tepid movie summaries with a cute closing sentence.

My favorite book trilogies

I'm shocked at how few trilogies there are out there, at least when I type in things like best book trilogies into Google.

There are a whole bunch of book series, but not just neat, tidy, three-book runs.

So, let's go with book series - and define that as at least three books (that I've read) in a connected story and by the same author (or at least published under the same author's name) - instead.

So, in no particular order...

• Hunger Games - quite popular right now for some reason...I read them when I was laid up with a back injury a few years back...good series for both young men and women because there's a ton of action and strong, female lead
• Harry Potter - I'm surprised if I find a book reader who hasn't read this in its entirety, so no big explanation is necessary...wonderfully helped spawn a continuing re-explosion in children's reading (now young adult reading, too)
• Incarnations of Immortality - read the seven books in this series when I was in high school and enjoyed the heck out of them...nice fantasy series exploring the immortals (war, death, time, god, devil, nature, fate) as offices held by mortals...interesting concept made more interesting by the family relationships that connect the series's current office holders
• Wrinkle in Time - loved it as a child, read the four books...re-read the first book as an adult and absolutely loathed it...fantasy premises that become more Christian as the series moved along...
• Discworld - funny stuff in fantasy form...the quality is routinely high, and you can drop in and out at any place in the series...hilarious books with thoroughly entertaining characters
• The Dark Tower - the linchpin around which Stephen King's career has ended up turning...encompasses so many genres (Western, sci-fi, fantasy, historical) and so many of his other tales (some intended, some connected after the fact)...
• MaddAddam - just finished the second book (accidentally read after the third) and found it redundant because I knew where the characters were eventually going...good read, though...
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - it's been a long time since I read these four, but they're another humorous series...fun sci-fi with a good sense of humor
• all of Kurt Vonnegut's world - my favorite author...not technically a series, but so many of his books have interconnected characters (sometimes in slightly different forms and with different details) that it's almost okay to call them of a single piece...wonderful writing...
• Dragons of... by Weis/Hickman - read these in high school, too, and was never satisfied with the non-Weis/Hickman books that followed...high fantasy with world building being done throughout...great D&D action and themes...

So many of these were read so far in the past that it's tough for me to rank them in any meaningful way. Young ChemGuy would certainly have ranked them very differently than old ChemGuy.

If I were forced to choose from among the ones I've read as an adult, I would probably but Vonnegut up top followed by Dark Tower, Harry Potter, and Discworld...then Hunger Games & Hitchhiker's...then MaddAddam.

The radar is open again

Media of which I have partaken of late...

Seconds by Bryan Lee O'Malley - O'Malley's follow-up to Scott Pilgrim takes a slightly older protagonist, Katie, still struggling with the fact that things in her life aren't working out exactly as she had planned.

In this case, the protagonist isn't, however, dwelling in a fantasy world as was Mr Pilgrim. Here Katie is a successful chef who is in the middle of putting together her first restaurant of her own while still trying to work at the titular Seconds as the head chef. As things don't go quite as planned at Seconds, Katie finds herself being visited by a house spirit that offers her a chance to change the day's events so that a friendly waitress won't be hurt by an accident in the kitchen. Katie takes advantage of the opportunity and then begins to spend every day living half a life, knowing that - in spite of the spirit's insistence that Katie only gets the singular second chance - she can cheat her way to redoing every single day.

Each morning, however, Katie wakes up in a world that has been changed in very unexpected ways. Her actions begin to have more and more drastic consequences: poisoning the house spirit; growing a second, evil house spirit; and changing her restaurant into something entirely not what she wanted.

O'Malley continues to mine the theme of revisionist history, of living in the now rather than in the past to great effect. This isn't the lengthy tale that Pilgrim is, but it's a far tighter story for that. It doesn't have the same emotional weight, but it's tighter, and it's still really good. Check it out.

Tucker & Dale vs Evil - See, most horror movies have the innocent (or trampy and drunk) college kids killed by the evil, murderous rednecks in the woods. This time, however, the rednecks are really nice people, unsure of themselves, just looking for a nice vacation home in the country, trying to help the nice neighbor kids.

When the kids misunderstand every single sentence from the eponymous Tucker and Dale, the kids end up killing themselves via accidents that continue to make Tucker and Dale look more and more sadistic.

It's not a horror classic, but it's a fun twist with likeable enough characters. Worth a look


Deadpool: Soul Hunter - Funny stuff from the merc with a mouth...

I particularly enjoyed the initial 'filler issue' that happened to lead directly into the second issue. Great use of the silver-age-style with Deadpool filling in for a drunken-no-more-until-Deadpool-comes-along Tony Stark in the Iron Man suit leading to trouble with a demon. Funny stuff...

All-New X-Men: Out of Their Depth & All-New X-Men: Here to Stay - I dig the concept of having the original X-Men, the teen mutants, show up in the present to find themselves terrifically changed - and in ways that horrify their younger selves. The idealism of youth coming up against the phenomenally hard truths of wizened age - especially when you're a comic book hero who sees just about everybody you care about die, change allegiances, nearly die, and fight each other all the times.

The dichotomy between young and old Scott Summers, the horror of young Jean Grey knowing that she will become the Phoenix and be killed, Hank McCoy seeing the blue mess that he will become...it all works really well.

Baseball Myths Debunked - This book doesn't. It's boring.

Punk Rock Jesus - and this one is dumb...don't read it. Read the same author's Joe the Barbarian instead...much better.

Sheezus by Lily Allen - I'll admit that I have a big soft spot for Lily Allen's first CD, Alright, Still. That is a brilliant, fun, witty bit of modern Brit pop, and encapsulation of an era, a rebirth of soul filtered through a very English sensibility. Her second disk, It's Not You, It's Me was a lot more polished and a lot less fun. I didn't dig the high-fashion turn that Allen was taking.

This third disk is somewhere in the middle, full of mocking - but with a bit too much bite and self-defensiveness at times. Not a bad disk at all, but not a great one, either. Worth a listen...





A Letter Home by Neil Young - ultimate in lo-fi...recorded in a straight-to-vinyl booth in Jack White's Nashville record store, Neil YOung has put out an album of covers, songs that he says influenced him. There's some pretty stuff here, but it's full of so many scratches, pops, hisses, and every other artifact of old that it's tough to listen to.

Here's the full album. Check out "Girl From the North Country" at 6:06 for the best track. (By the nature of the length of the disks the booth produces, the songs are no longer than about 3:00 each.)

My top tens

Tastes shift, and favorites come and go.

It's a fact of life.

Because of this any attempt to list my ten favorite whatevers will only result in a list of my tastes at the moment. A year down the road, things in favor could fall out, and others could take their place.

With all that as caveat, I offer up my all-time top tens (or so, and in no order within each list)...

• Movies...(not necessarily the greatest, just my favorites)
• Hero
• The Usual Suspects
• Dr Strangelove
• Fight Club
• Hoosiers
• The Muppet Movie
• The Player
• The Thin Red Line
• The Big Lebowski
• Goodfellas 
• Books (must've read each at least twice to earn inclusion in the list)
• Brave New World
• Slaughterhouse 5
• The Electric Brae
• The Book of Basketball 
• Infinite in All Directions
• Haunted
• Iowa Baseball Confederacy
• Radioactive: a tale of love and fallout
• The Disappearing Spoon
• The Great Shark Hunt 
• Albums/CDs (the most prone to shifting tastes...avoiding Greatest Hits packages)
• My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West
• The Heist - Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
• Blood on the Tapes - Bob Dylan bootleg
• A Ghost is Born - Wilco
• Plastic Beach - Gorillaz
• Alright, Still - Lily Allen
• Gold - Ryan Adams
• Graceland - Paul Simon
• Step Inside This House - Lyle Lovett
• Body Talk - Robyn
• Traveling Wilburys - Traveling Wilburys
• Television Shows (also very much prone to shifting tastes)
• The Wire
• Deadwood
• Scrubs
• Mad About You
• Parks and Recreation
• Bob's Burgers
• Archer
• The Daily Show
• The Colbert Report
• Sportscenter
• Albums/CDs (greatest hits collections only)
• Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years - Richard Thompson
• The Best of 1980-1990 - U2
• A Quiet, Normal Life - Warren Zevon
• Carry on Up the Charts - The Beautiful South
• Decade - Neil Young
• The Hits/The B-Sides - Prince
• Just Another Band from East LA - Los Lobos
• Personal Best - Harry Nilsson
• The Very Best of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
• The Very Good Years - Frank Sinatra 
• Comics (not full series)
• Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow
• Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader
• Spider-Man: Blue
• Supreme: Story of the Year
• Pride of Baghdad
• Superman: Secret Identity
• Eternals
• Batgirl: Year One
• Superman: Red Son
• Batman: The Long Halloween
• Superman/Batman: Absolute Power
• Dark Knight Returns 
• Comic series
• Planetary
• Sandman
• Invincible
• All-Star Superman
• Powers
• Watchmen
• Astro City
• Ultimate Spider-Man
• Astonishing X-Men (Whedon's run)
• Fables
• DMZ 
• Locke & Key
• Scott Pilgrim
• Restaurants & foods
• cajun - Knotty Pine on the Bayou
• burger - Terry's Turf Club
• steak - Jeff Ruby's (downtown)
• breakfast - Waffle House (Cincinnati-Dayton Rd location, specifically)
• all-around casual - Troy's Cafe & Catering
• best fries - Senate
• pasta - Paesano's
• pizza - Dewey's and Betta's Italian Oven
• Greek - Greek Isles
• bbq - Eli's

Are there any other 'favorites' that you'd like to know?

Yearly wrap-up of yearly wrap-ups

• Every movie trailer from 2013 supercut -  I didn't see Upstream Color anywhere.
• Top movie mistakes of 2013 - Some are kinda picky.
• LA Film Critics and AFI reveal their best films of the year - I've seen none of the movies on that list.

• XKCD's year in review - I'm pretty bummed by it, too. 

Mixed Media

As always, I'm reading and watching and absorbing...

Batman: Earth One - At what point are we just muddying the waters?

For the umpteenth time an author has taken Bob Kane's outline - loving parents, murder, training, revenge - and written the same story with different beats and notes, and I don't see the need for it. Yes, if the story is well told, that's all the matters, but I didn't so much think this was all that well written.

It's fine - with Alfred's prosthetic leg, Mayor Cobblepot, a cowardly and broken Jim Gordon, a handsome Harvey Bullock - it's just not anything special. Meh...

Superman: Earth One: Volume Two - Read above...repeat...

Only here Clark Kent wants to get some action and is regretting the fact that his powers prevent...um...well...coupling with a human woman. It's somehow distasteful to me, even down to Clark and Pa Kent talking about the inevitable difficulties of carnal love. And the fact that they make his love interest an escort/prostitute so that he can turn away and stay friends. It almost feels like the writers here are teasing something far more lascivious than they're willing to deliver here, too.

They also write Clark as more violent - he picks up and threatens one of his 'love interest's' johns when he threatens to get violent with her and then also appears in the bedroom of a general who tells him to get out of his country. Again, I found it distasteful.

Marvel Knights: Black Panther - Things started off promisingly enough with the John Romita Jr art style and the cool music, but things just petered out over the course of these six twenty-minute episodes. Over the course of the two-hour running time, there is probably a very fine, maybe one-hour of story padded out with a whole lot of 'previously on' and 'next time' clips.

Even the Romita style disappears by the end of the series and is replaced with a far more cartoony style, meaning that the only thing worth recommending here isn't even there for the full time. Blech...

Red Hood and the Outlaws - From the casual, trampy, over-sexed Koriander to the ridiculously spiritual Jason Todd, this series should have been aborted from the get go.

Ted - Easily the best work of the weeks.

It's crass and foul and offensive in oh so many ways, but it's surprisingly moving and actually kinda touching when things nearly take a negative turn in the climax.

It's tough to talk about the best moments of this one because they're pretty much all wrong and the kind of jokes that I shouldn't tell on this blog what with the students around and all.



The Bostonian accents; the realness of Ted, himself; the vulgarity...it all works wonderfully

5 Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth - I'm guessing that most folks who are on the web have read some of The Oatmeal's comics, and this is a book-long collection of those. Supposedly there are a few non-web gems here and there, but I couldn't tell 'em from the regular ones. It's chucklesome, but it's nothing that I need to ever flip through again.

Wonder Woman: Blood - Back to the New 52 for DC...

I was surprisingly happy with this, considering how crap I've thought the New 52 volumes have been.

In total, the read of Wonder Woman is good times all around.

Great use of Wonder Woman's Greek mythological family for the reboot and gorgeous artwork from Cliff Chiang...

Sadly, then, Chiang gets replaced by Tony Akins after the first four issues. The artwork isn't bad there, it's just not quite as awesome.

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents - Dumb...avoid it...

Twilight Zone: The After Hours - I'm thinking that an Twilight Zone story from the original series (and that was remade in the 1980's version) doesn't need a graphic novel adaptation - even if it was a student project.

This one really doesn't work because the plot - a woman wanders around a department store and eventually learns that she is actually a mannequin come to life and whose time in the world is up so that another mannequin can take a turn (oh, spoiler, I guess) - requires mannequins to come to life. This is a little tough for a still image storytelling medium to convey. In a number of panels it's confusing trying to tell whether the vague sense of unease is because the people are alive or aren't moving.

Skip it...

Pitch Perfect - The plot is thoroughly predictable, mixing up sports cliches (the team almost loses before the finals but is saved at the last moment, a star player on the bad team ditches his teammates but has to be replaced by a benchwarmer who comes through at the last moment, the former star on the good team has to learn to give up control to the up and coming, more creative and free star, shockingly the two best teams in the country are from the same school!) and college movie romantic cliches (the main character finally gets around to watching the movie the love interest had wanted her to see all along, and it brings them together for good).

Luckily, the actors are thoroughly engaging and likable. Anna Kendrick is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors, showing a joy in her performance and never quite pulling off the edgy girl so much as the cute girl trying to be edgy. The performances are also a blast - if the alleged spontaneity leads to some pretty spectacular and unreasonably polished impromptu accomplishments...





If those seem too hokey or twee for you, avoid this. I, however, thoroughly enjoyed the film - and especially appreciated the performance commentary from Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins.

Big Man Japan - What the heck did I just watch?

Man, this is a weird, weird film. The trailer for which does absolutely nothing in selling what the film really is: a fake documentary film about the man who transforms himself into Japan's last giant defender.



Instead of the constant, wacky action that the trailer seems to suggest makes up the bulk of the film, we get a sad story of a man whose responsibilities to his nation have robbed him of any semblance of a life more than solitary meals at the local noodle restaurant.

And then the Power Rangers show up to save the day.

Seriously, with absolutely no reason for it, no groundwork laid for it, the conclusion shows a superteam of totally not-previously-mentioned or alluded-to show up to fix everything and then yell at each other.

Freaky weird...and not in a good way...

The Unwritten (vol 1-5) - This one fell into my library queue almost by accident as two different year-end lists had it on their best-of compilation for 2012. I'm not one to avoid the best stuff...if the library has it for free, so I gave the first five volumes a chance.

What I found was an incredibly rich, involved, detailed plot winding its way through the volumes requiring a lot of attention and willingness for me to let the story reel out a bit before I found the true thread. It's not an easy read, but it's a rewarding one.

The plot seems silly and highly derivative as a Harry-Potter-esque main character (Tommy Taylor) seems to have come to life, crafted into the real world from pure story-telling energy by his author father - but without Tommy knowing it. He thinks he's just a real boy whose dad used his name for the most famous stories in the world. The truth, however, is even far more complicated as Dad created Tommy to fight a centuries-long secret cabal of...storytellers, I guess...who have been shaping our world through the magic of stories for longer than anyone can imagine.

Magic, literary references (thankfully explained as most go over my head), friendship, love, and myth ensue...

I'm hooked...

Vonne Gut Reactions: Bluebeard

Twelve down...two more to go...I'm not making 'em all in 2012, but I'll have 'em wrapped by by early in 2013, at least.

Bluebeard is an odd Vonnegut book in that it almost doesn't feel like a Vonnegut book at all. Yes, there are a number of Vonnegut ticks throughout the book, but there are also a number of aspects that feel almost as if Vonnegut was trying something else here, something that is paralleled in the story of Rabo Karabekian, the book's main character.

Let's take a look at the two sets of things - Vonnegut-isms and non...

This book is clearly a Vonnegut story because (pages refer to the edition shown above)...

• Rabo Karabekian - Our main character first appeared in Breakfast of Champions as the painter of a The Temptation of Saint Anthony, for which $50,000 was paid, making it the most valuable work in Midland City, OH's new art museum.
• introduction - "Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions and hence distressing seriousness." - Vonnegut has long espoused his belief that money only has value because we, as a group, have convinced each other that it has value. This is, of course, true, but it appears again and again in this book as the pieces of modern expressionistic artwork switch very quickly from worthless to immensely valuable.
• p32 - "everyone alive is a survivor" - We first heard this in Galapagos. Vonnegut often ascribed the survival or heroism or success - as well as death, cowardice, failure - to random chance rather than to any skill - intellectual or physical. Those of us who survive are simply the ones who survive. And so it goes...
• p27 - " 'Never trust a survivor,' my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, 'until you find out what he did to stay alive.' " - Vonnegut saw horrors and war. In his books he continually states of those horrors, of the reluctance of the survivors to speak of the horrors, and what some of the survivors had to do to become survivor.
• p46  - The book is titled Bluebeard, and here Vonnegut summarizes the tale of Bluebeard and his one room kept secret from his many wives. Karabekian keeps a similarly locked room, his potato barn, and allows full access to his world except for the barn. Vonnegut makes this comparison openly and without artifice. He keeps few secrets from the readers.
• p147 - "Another was triangular in cross-section, so that the wound it made wouldn't close up again and keep the blood and guts from falling out." - Roland Weary states something similar in Slaughterhouse Five.

The book is, however, quite unlike Vonnegut's other stories in many ways...

• The main character ends up happy this time. This really is something unique in Vonnegut's stories. Bill Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse Five ended up resigned to his fate, as did Paul Proteus in Player Piano, Eliot Rosewater in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, Walter Starbuck in Jailbird, and Rudy Waltz of Deadeye Dick. Others have ended up dead or dying: Malachi Constant (Sirens of Titan), Howard Campbell (Mother Night), narrator John (Cat's Cradle), and Leon Trout (Galapagos).
  
  Here Karabekian seems to actually be happy at the end of the book, and the ending felt hopeful. That's new...
• Circe Berman is a female character who isn't placed on a pedestal, isn't two-dimensional, and is a force for good (and some minor misery) for our main character. She is a very successful author - under a pseudonym. She brings Karabekian out of his self-imposed exile from the world and leaves him far happier than she found him. This might be the first positive female character that we've seen in a Vonnegut story, and even she's not 100% positive.

This is one of the few Vonnegut books that has absolutely left me happy at the end of the book. Even Slaughterhouse and Breakfast of Champions, books that I think are far greater than this one didn't leave me absolutely happy.

I know we only have two books left in Vonnegut's career, but I can understand how critics at the time could have thought that this book - coming only two years after Galapagos - would have signaled a return of Vonnegut from the doldrums of Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, and Slapstick.

Hocus Pocus next. I'm about a fourth of the way through reading that as I write these words.

Vonne Gut Reactions: Galapagos

It's been too long, but we're too late to apologize now.

Galapagos is the first really excellent Vonnegut book that I've read since Breakfast of Champions. That's a run of three pretty mediocre books - Deadeye Dick, Jailbird, and Slapstick. This is a return to Vonnegut's strength, to a story that matters to him and consequently to us.

This may also be Vonnegut at his most hopeful - as only Vonnegut could be, however. Our tale is told by a ghostly narrator who died in the building of the ship on which much of our tale revolves. Our narrator, Kilgore Trout's son, has chosen to avoid heading into the blue tunnel of the afterlife, a fate that his father begs him to take. Instead, Leon Trout stays on Earth to hope to understand the human condition just a little better and is given a million years to do so.

In the million years of watching, Trout sees humankind evolve from what we are to an ocean- and island-dwelling species with fins and fur suited for fishing in the waters off the Galapagos islands on which our entire species lives. The book thankfully focuses on the events that lead to our modern Noah's Arc of fewer than a dozen survivors finding themselves shipwrecked on Santa Rosalia island on which they are to make their home in perpetuity. The world's economy collapses, Peru attacks Ecuador, mental instabilities bring together our cast of characters, accidents and chance clear the remainder of the book's characters, and natural selection works its magic from there.

Vonnegut's main themes here are ones that we have seen before: the failings of our big brains and the effects of chance events on our future. Repeatedly Vonnegut explains that our big brains - shrunken to allow for more streamlined swimming a million years in our future - and their failings constantly lead to problems in our modern world, allowing us to lie, to delude ourselves, and to choose actions clearly designed to overcome evolution and somehow remove ourselves from the gene pool. Chance also plays a huge part in shaping events, bringing together figures that will become our species's eventual genetic starting points.

Things I noticed along the way...(pages refer to the edition of the book shown at the top there)

• p8 - "...every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about thee kilograms! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute." - the first mention of our big brains being the source of so many of our problems
• p14 - "in his native city of Midland City, OH" - Hey, we've seen Midland City before.
• p18 - "Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical." - A number of times in his books, Vonnegut had given us examples of objects whose value has changed dramatically because of one person's efforts or words or beliefs. This shows up again late in Galapagos when 'the nature cruise of the century' becomes The Nature Cruise of the Century because Jackie O signs on to take it and because the cruise's promoter refuses to refer to it as anything but 'the nature cruise of the century'.
• p19 - "The two with stars by their names would be dead before the sun went down." - Vonnegut again tells us of the fate of our characters long before that fate takes place.
• p24 - "It was all in people's heads. People had simply changed their opinion of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg." - Again, opinions changing the value of something - and our big brains causing problems.
• p65 - " 'Marriage: a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.' Ambrose Bierce (1842-?)...'Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine --/A sad, sour, sober beverage --by time/Is sharpen'd from its high celestial flavour,/Down to a very homely household savour.' Lord Byron (1788-1824) " - Two quotes from Vonnegut that don't present a positive view of marriage. Shocking...
• p70 - "I have already given my opinion as to the cause for the craze back then for having machines do everything that human beings did -- and I mean everything." - One of Vonnegut's recurring themes throughout his books is our urge to develop machines to replace ourselves and our subsequent dissatisfaction with being replaced.
• p74 - " And the people would eat all the food, gobble, gobble, yum, yum, and it would become nothing but excrement and memories." - Vonnegut seems to see everything we do as pointless and dramatically impermanent. 
• p81 - "And if I were criticizing human bodies as they were a million years ago, ... I would have two main points to make -- one of which I have surely made by now in my story: 'The brain is much too big to be practical.' " - Yup, big brains are the source of so many of our problems.
• p90 - ""He had just moved into new offices within the hollow crown of the Chrysler Building, formerly the showroom of a harp company" - We got to meet that harp company back in Jailbird.
• p108 - " Of course I love you,/So let's have a kid/Who will say exactly/What its parents did:/ 'Of course I love you,/So let's have a kid/Who will say exactly/What its parents did: ...Noble Claggett (1947-1966)" - We've seen a number of repetitive poems in Vonnegut's works (Yon Yonson from Slaughterhouse, for example). The mating dance of the blue-footed booby is also mentioned as being repetitive and without reason in this book.
• p111 - "Human beings use to be molecules which could do many, many different sorts of dances, or decline to dance at all-- as they pleased." - Vonnegut often refers to humans as nothing more than molecules or machines or animals trained or programmed to do what they do.
• p120 - "The other nobody was her husband, who himself played a crucial role in shaping human destiny by booking, when facing his own extinction, that one cheap cabin below the waterline." - Mary's husband Roy booked that cabin because he had gone insane, his big brain betraying him. If the cabin hadn't been booked, Mary wouldn't have become the Mother Nature to the future human race. Random events...
• p136 - "If I'm what's bothering you, you can tell me to take a flying f*** at a rolling doughnut, and I'll be the first to sympathize." - Vonnegut has used this phrase "a flying f*** at a rolling doughnut" before, in Slapstick.
• p149 - "His brain was telling him all sorts of things that were not true -- that he was the greatest dancer in the world, that he was the son of Frank Sinatra, that people envious of his dancing ability were attempting to destroy his brains with little radios, and on and on." - Dwayne Hoover had this happen to him. So did, perhaps, Billy Pilgrim. It's a common problem for Vonnegut's characters.
• p162 - "But then some tiny animals evolved into rodents. These easily found and ate the ggs of the tortoises -- all of the eggs." - The eventual downfall of the human race - other than the few survivors on Saint Rosalia - is a bacterium that evolves to destroy the eggs of human women. A parallel between us and animals...
• p219 - "I was the ghost of a ghost ship. I am the son of a big-brained science fiction writer, whose name was Kilgore Trout." - This is the first time that our narrator is given a name, and he is connected to Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's literary alter ego.
• p226 - "Mary said things like this to *Wait in so many words, but her tone alone would have delivers the same messages: 'We love you. You are not alone. Everything is going to be all right,' and so on." - Vonnegut often explains that all we hope for is a bit of reassurance, kindness, and connection. Here, a dying man is comforted by just those simple messages.
• p229 - "and he was mowing the lawn of a fabulously well-to-do automobile dealer and owner of local fast-food restaurants named Dwayne Hoover." - Hey, Dwayne, it's been a while since we've seen you. In these pages we find out that Dwayne's son - "a good dancer and very musical, just like *Wait" - was actually not Dwayne's genetic son.
• p255 - "Like the people on this accursed ship, my boy, they are led by captains who have no charts or compasses, and who deal from minute to minute with no problem more substantial than how to protect their self-esteem." - Vonnegut doesn't have a whole lot of faith in our leaders.
• p292 - "Have natural rafts of vegetable matter from anywhere arrived here in my time, with or without passengers? No." - One of the theories (source) of how some of the larger land animals got to the Galapagos Islands is that they arrived via natural rafts, the mechanism of which is seriously in doubt. Vonnegut mentions this in passing, and I found it funny.

This cover, by the way,
 is my favorite of the various
ones I found online.

Vonnegut commits his apocalypse via evolution (bacteria evolving to feed upon human eggs) but also offers his version of salvation via the same mechanism of natural selection and evolution. The first child born on Saint Rosalia is mutated because of her mother's exposure to radiation from Hiroshima and comes out with a thin coating of fur, protecting her from the rough rocks on and the cold water around the island. This advantageous trait is then passed along generation by generation as the last vestiges of humanity evolve to their new habitat.

It's nice to read a great Vonnegut book again.

Three more books to go before the end of the year.

Ranking Vonnegut's books based on which ones I enjoyed most (not necessarily which are the best or the worst)...

1. Salughterhouse Five, of the Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death (excellent)
2. Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday (excellent)
3. Cat's Cradle (really, very good)
4. Galapagos (really, very good)
5. Mother Night (really, very good)
6. God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine (good)
7. Jailbird (good)
8. Player Piano (meh)
9. Deadeye Dick (meh)
10. Slapstick (meh)
11. The Sirens of Titan (painful)

Still to come...Bluebeard...Hocus Pocus...Timequake...