575. Cat's Cradle

Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
1963
Around 180 pages

I find it harder to write about books I love than books I hate. It's so much easier to bitch about Anthony Burgess than put into my words my deep feelings for Vonnegut. This is why I would never want to write my own wedding vows, I would turn it into a roast.

Our narrator Jonah is a writer who frames the story as a flashback. In the mid-20th century, the plot occurs at a time when he was writing a book called The Day the World Ended about what people were doing on the day of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The novel is also interspersed with passages from an odd religious scripture known as The Books of Bokonon.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors, and his dark humor is a welcome addition on this List, which has skewed toward scatological lately. Finally, we are talking about Hiroshima, which hasn't really been meaningfully addressed yet in fiction, at least if this List is any indication. 

This is a five star novel, but amazingly, it's still not my favorite Vonnegut. He's just that good.

RATING: *****

Interesting Facts:

Vonnegut claimed that his books "are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips and each chip is a joke."

Challenged in New Hampshire and Ohio.

After turning down his original thesis in 1947, the University of Chicago awarded Vonnegut his master's degree in anthropology in 1971 for Cat's Cradle.

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