Books by author: Kurt Vonnegut

I was very sad when Kurt Vonnegut died last year (so it goes). He has been a hero to me for more than twenty years (since high school, when I discovered his novels). I had some reservations when I heard that a posthumous collection of unpublished stories and essays was being released, since if these pieces were worthy of his canon, Vonnegut probably would have published them on his own.

My fears were realized when I read this collection, but I'm still glad that I had the opportunity to read these pieces. A lot of Vonnegut's best writing drew heavily—though often tangentially—on his experience as a POW in Dresden, Germany during World War II. This collection contains several short stories that are explicit reflections on that experience, and the overall effect is almost a holographic recreation of those events. It's a bit of a mess creatively, but it hammers home just how much that experience shaped Vonnegut's world view.

Goodbye, Kurt. I miss you a lot.

Bagombo Snuff Box is a collection of Vonnegut's early short stories. Most or all of them are considered by the author to be throwaways, and I concur, with the minor caveat that it is interesting to see the first steps of an interesting author. This collection is recommended only to hardcore Vonnegut fans.

In this novel, Vonnegut uses Borges's technique of writing summaries of nonexistent novels and stories written by a fictitious author (in this case, of course, the author is Kilgore Trout). One of the main themes of this novel is that humans are automatons having no free will. The idea that people are characters in the mind of an unknown author is visited in several ways. Breakfast of Champions is more "vulgar" than the average novel (by the end of the novel, the reader is aware of the penis measurements - both length and girth - of every male character), and I'm not sure what narrative purpose Vonnegut's technique serves.

At my suggestion, my book club chose Cat's Cradle for the February selection. I was nervous about it, because although it's my utmost favorite book, several people I've recommended it to have hated it.

The reactions of the book club members spanned a wide spectrum. Those who disliked it mostly didn't care for the scifi elements and the lack of character depth. Those who enjoyed it thought it raised interesting questions about morality, religion, government, and the human condition. The two of us who loved it the most had both first read it at about age 15 (about 20 years ago for me). Everyone liked it more in retrospect after talking about it.

Since it has been nearly ten years since the last time I read it, I brought more to it this time, and I enjoyed it as much as I always have. I found some new favorite passages, including the very timely "The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do." I better appreciated how McCabe and Bokonon got lost in their play-acting, and how much government is in the business of giving people meaningless things to talk about and fight over so that they don't notice the horrible conditions they live in. For the first time, I noticed Vonnegut's subtle musings about free will.

Cat's Cradle is a deceptively simple book. The plot is easy to follow and the chapters are mostly just a few paragraphs each. It has, however, a tremendous depth. It paints a humanist viewpoint in a hilariously satirical manner. Every time I read it, I laugh out loud at every second or third page, and I regularly marvel at the terse, subversive cleverness of Vonnegut's writing.

This is easily my favorite book of all time. I've read it at least six or seven times (the most recent before this one was in 1989), but every page still resonates with me. Cat's Cradle is the best novelization of my cosmology that I've come across to date; in many ways, I am a Bokononist. Cat's Cradle should be required reading for every adult. I have never read another book that had me simultaneously howling in laughter and thinking hard about the meaning of it all. Busy, busy, busy.

This collection, a followup to Vonnegut's earlier autobiographical pastiche Palm Sunday, is a mess. There's no coherence to it at all, and though I always enjoy his brutally honest style and sardonic wit, I found little to savor here. For Vonnegut autobiography, check out Palm Sunday.

Well, I think this Vonnegut kick is finally over. I have finally read all of his novels (many of them twice; Cat's Cradle a dozen times). At this point, the most interesting thing about them is their interconnections. It seems that every novel refers to characters and settings in the other novels. I didn't pick up on this when I read them in high school. The themes are all consistent as well, so a beginner could probably read Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five and call it a night. Vonnegut's philosophy is so much like my own that I enjoyed reading them all just for reinforcement.

This ultra-brief folio of essays began as a series of interstitial monologues that Vonnegut recorded to help WNYC public radio raise money. It's an amusing collage of imagined interviews with dead people conducted while Vonnegut undergoes near-death experiences at the hands of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Vonnegut hasn't had anything much new to say in his writing in more than twenty years, but I still greatly enjoy his work. Among his more recent writing, I recommend A Man Without a Country above this one.

I've been a Vonnegut fan for about twenty years. I finished reading all of his novels in 1999, and now I've finished reading all of his other books (with the exception of Nothing is Lost Save Honor, which is unavailable except for more than $500). I wish there were more.

This was one of the few Vonnegut novels I hadn't yet read. I picked up a used paperback copy some time ago, and finally got around to reading it, mostly because I needed something fairly breezy (yet entertaining) while I've been working these 60-80 hour weeks. I'm reminded, actually, of A Confederacy of Dunces, in terms of how "average" Americans are portrayed.

Vonnegut is just brilliant. He has an amazing ability to make the most horrible aspects of human life gut-wrenchingly funny. While this novel isn't as tight or as funny as Cat's Cradle, it's still much better than most modern novels.

I adore Kurt Vonnegut. I share a great deal of his personal philosophy (as I've been able to glean it from his writing), and it turns out that I share much of his politics as well. In spite of the dire subject matter here (in large part modern politics and the "war on terror"), Vonnegut manages to make me laugh in nearly every paragraph. His writing is absolutely masterful — there are few if any writers alive today who can match his seeming simplicity while packing in such wry insight. Mark Twain is a possible historical comparison. Absolutely brilliant.

This is an amalgamation of personal anecdotes from the wonderful allegorical writer. I greatly enjoyed his novels, most of which I read between 10th and 12th grade. I fear that I may have overlooked some of their significance, but I haven't been inspired to re-read them yet.

This was Vonnegut's first novel (it was published in 1952), and it's pretty obvious that he hadn't yet found his voice. The ideas are great, however, and it's a worthwhile read for Vonnegut afficianados.

This is perhaps the best time-travel novel ever written. The episodic pastiche of Billy Pilgrim's life is very carefully constructed, and Vonnegut's prose flows with deceptive ease. When I first read this (in high-school), I didn't recognize the references to Vonnegut's other books, but several characters have cameos, including Kilgore Trout (of course), Eliot Rosewater, Howard Campbell, and the city of Ilium. There may even be others, but I haven't read all of Vonnegut's novels yet, and I may have missed some.

I have a feeling I'm starting in on a serious Vonnegut kick. It's ironic that his writing is philosophically so close to my worldview now, nearly ten years after I last read his work. His ideas about determinism (are people machines?) and humanity's place in the universe are very similar to my own. Timequake is a novel in the purest sense of the word — no fiction like it existed before it was written. It is mostly autobiographical, though the lines between Vonnegut and his protagonist, Kilgore Trout, grow dim. One thing I don't get is how Trout was resurrected — in Breakfast of Champions he was born in 1907 and died in 1981, but in Timequake he is alive in 2001. So it goes.