Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I loved the beginning so much but it fizzled out a little. There were amazing sentences and thoughts throughout. A mentally ill author (a fictional interior voice which I’m sure resembles Vonnegut but is not quite him- and oh hey was this also Kilgore or no?) writes about the breakdown of his mentally ill character, Dwayne.

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Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a long collection with a lot of short stories. They're all at least pretty solid, and some of them I love. I think my favorite- and I suspect this is a strange choice is "Who Am I This Time?" which I find to be exceptionally odd and romantic in a novel way.

The title story, "Welcome to the Monkey House" is very rapey and doesn't hold up to modern scrutiny at all, so it's really a shame that the entire collection is named this. Not surprisingly it was first published in Playboy. Ugh, boys and men growing up in the late 60s were reading this story basically justifying rape.

I particularly enjoyed the futuristic sci-fi/fantasy stories like "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" and "Unready to Wear." ("Harrison Bergeron" on the other hand seemed a little bit juvenile to me as a rather simplistic dystopian realization of liberal ideals.) The last story, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" could have been a full-length dystopian novel but maybe it would have been too big a bummer and is kind of darkly humorous as a short story.

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Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I love this book. I loved every minute of it. It's a masterpiece about science, religion, literature, war and human destruction.

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.

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Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."

I love this book. I love the idea of getting unstuck in time- and it's definitely a thing that can happen to a person, psychologically speaking. (Though possibly there's some physics to suggest it could happen in reality as well.)

I love the protest of "So it goes." It's like a prayer after the death of each individual in the novel.

I love all the discontinuous moments of Billy Pilgrim's life.

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