Thought on Kurt Vonnegut?He's a beloved author and from what I gather he seems like a solid approachable modern novelistWhat are his best works?
>>24964743Slaughterhouse V, Player Piano and Breakfast of Champions are supposed to be good. I hate Vonnegut and had to claw my way through Slaughterhouse V which read like Reddit patient zero, but I felt bad not seeing anyone reply to your thread.
>>24964743Slaughterhouse 5 feels trite now possibly due to cultural osmosis. Po tee weet. I haven’t had much luck with him otherwise. Mother night was high concept but he couldn’t do anything interesting with it. I guess the saving grace is he writes short so it’s not much of a time investment.
>>24964743Enjoy him but you would want to space out his works. Read 3 in the one year and they are a bit samey for the frequency.
Jailbird is underrated
>>24964743read hocus pocus and liked it. it was a funny pocket book. starts dragging towards the end. funny bits and cultural talk all over the book. there's some slight liberal schpiels on racism or atheism but there's also funny racist gags and level-headed commentary. the concept of the computer griot was what caught my attention the most. and the n word gag with the plane. not a masterpiece but a good and funny pocket book. bought it used for like 3 bucks.
>>24964743You'd think a WWII veteran would be less of a downer. His nihilism is insufferable and is present in every one of his books
Started listening to Slaughterhouse V last night as a refresher since I read it in high school. I get why it‘d be easy to hate him for being a bit of a quirk chungus but most authors of his era (I‘m going to single out Pynchon and Roth) did the same thing without the moments of sincerity and so my overall impression at this time is lukewarm-positive. It was also probably a lot more groundbreaking in the sixties to write a Dresden book with David Irving supplementing his own experience, has waned in its impact as "le war is bad yes even that war (kinda)" became a cultural standard, and I think is now set for an upswing again as social policing gets more rigid. Will read Mother Night after this. Even if he‘s not Faulkner or McCarthy-tier, the output of an overtly self-identifying German American diaspora interests me.
>>24964743it will never cease to be funny how an avowed socialist wrote THE defining anti-egalitarian short story (Harrison Bergeron).
he was wrong about ww2 and he was wrong about everything elsehistory has judged him to be worthlessnobody under the age of 70 even knows who he his
>>24964761Now that I’m thinking about it, I will say that his description of the firebombing of Dresden was compelling enough to stick with me, and has an unavoidable influence of how I understand and perceive the event. It’s his villain origin story, so it would have to be at least capable of translating into the page if he was going to justify the drab nihilism and absurdity. But Slaughterhouse V is just filling a slot in the replacement programme for what counts as classic literature in the mind of an American. When you say “classic”. The American is conditioned to thinking that means a couple of titles no older than one hundred years. Catcher in the Rye, Catch 22, Great Gatsby, 1984, Slaughterhouse V, to Kill A Mocking Bird, all pseudo-novels that are only classic insofar as they heartily flatter a few hyper-bourgeois generations that were too provincial for even Dickens. It’s astroturfing through inertia at this point.
When I was a teenager, the Tralfamadorian worldview in Slaughterhouse V gave me a sense of perspective on things that I still think of many years later. For that reason I'd recommend it.I haven't really read his other stuff. I dropped Breakfast of Champions a long time ago and didn't try much else since.
>>24964743I tried reading slaughterhouse 5 and was disgusted by the mushy sentimentalism
I liked Slaughterhouse 5. It was a great depiction of PTSD. Cat's Cradle on the other hand irritated me.
>>24964743I've only read Slaughterhouse V by him, and I really disliked it.>experience dresden>feel the need to write a book about dresden>dresden was traumatic>you'd rather avoid confronting the trauma>write a book about experiencing trauma without directly confronting the trauma>this is my book about dresdenSo it goes.
>>24964743Slaughterhouse five was meh, I remember liking slapstick though
>>24964743He's the perhaps the most shameless plagiarist of the 20th century. His writing style, his humor, even his drip, all stolen from picrels nonfic.
>>24964743Breakfast of Champions and Mother Night are his best. Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle are his most accessible.
Is Vonnegut required reading in the USA? If not I don't get why people hate him so muchI thought Slaughterhouse V was great
