Kurt Vonnegut dead.

[LimpingFish]

And so another of our greatest writers shuffles off his mortal coil.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

November 11, 1922 â€" April 11, 2007

If you don't know who he was, do yourself a favour and go find out.

[Jon]

R.I.P  :'(

[voh]

Got slaughterhouse 5 for my birthday 2 years ago.

It's a shame that now that I know he's a good author, he goes deadie-bye.

R.I.P. ya wordsmith 

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Well he lived a long, successful life so I don't see why we should mourn him.  Better to mourn people who die penniless and unloved.  Kurt Vonnegut was not such a man.

[evenwolf]

* Kurt Vonnegut is mulch!

In almost every one of Vonnegut's books there was a theme regarding dealing with death.   It was always very casual.   An older man whose friends have passed into the blue tunnel of the afterlife.    In Galapagos he listed those soon to die with an asterisk before their name.  In Slaughterhouse 5  a man dies and "so it goes."   In Slapstick, he would quote Laurel and Hardy's "hi ho!"

So very comical and wise this man.   Don't mourn so much as celebrate what the man accomplished.  And if you find yourself in a library pick up something like Cat's Cradle or Breakfast of Champions.    Oddly, Ive been on a Vonnegut binge lately and just finished Jailbird.  My current favorites are Slapstick, Galapagos, and Sirens of Titan.

What you'll find is that he was a very witty man who crafted his words after Mark Twain.  After reading that kind of wit, there's not a whole lot else that will satisfy.   So it goes!

[SSH]

* Kurt Vonnegut is mulch!

Yes, he is Breakfast of Champignons...

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I will now read Slapstick.  Thanks evenwolf!

[LimpingFish]

Sirens of Titan is an excellent book indeed. I would also recommend:

Welcome to the Monkey House (Short stories).
Slaughterhouse Five.
Breakfast of Champions.

...for starters.

ProgZ: Successful and loved he may have been, and 84 is a fine age. But he died of head injuries he suffered from a fall, not from old age or any sickness.

For a man who witnessed, and survived, the wholesale massacre of Dresden and it's people during WWII, such a stupid, pointless death is reason enough to be sad.

And with him goes Kilgore Trout, who perhaps wrote even better stories than he himself.

[evenwolf]

Sirens of Titan.  That is the easiest read.   I finished it in about two days.   But the concepts are so rich and the imagery is really really stimulating.   My memory of Sirens is almost like I imagined a movie in my head.


I love Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse but I never understood why those were his most popular.   Cat's Cradle is addictive and makes more sense to be so popular.   There's one that I really like but I don't recommend it to a first time reader because the narrator is so well disguised from being Kurt.    And that's Bluebeard.   Its about an eccentric Armenian painter who used to develop camouflage for the military on account of his expertise of art.   And he became the biggest embarrassment in the expressionist movement when all his famous pieces melted away due to using faulty paint.   So years later a houseguest insists that he write an autobiography, and the book he writes floats in between his guest's antics and the past she's forcing him to share.  All the while there is a potato barn on his property with three large padlocks.   Nobody knows what's inside and he refuses to tell anyone.   Simply a brilliant novel but read another one of Vonnegut's books first!