Here is what I love about Kurt Vonnegut. To quote:
Where do I get all my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.Paired with:
Somebody might now want to ask me, "Can't you ever be serious?" The answer is, "No."
Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of previously unpublished short works, most of which are fiction, most of which have to do with war and Dresden and POW's. The book doesn't list when these were originally written, though someone on the internet said it was between Vonnegut's time in WII and kicking off his career as a novelist, and that pretty much makes sense.
The first piece is not fiction, it's the letter written by Vonnegut to his dad in 1945 at the end of his part in the war. It's stark and stunning and probably made his dad laugh and cry to read it.
The piece that made me cry was Spoils, about a freed American POW who loots a farm and kills what turns out to be the beloved pet rabbit of a poor, crippled Czech farm boy. I know.
The piece I liked best was Guns Before Butter, about a group of malnourished American POW's who sit around and talk about all the amazing food they're going to eat when they get home. That's the kind of story I can really get behind.
Short stories are good for short attention spans, Sara! This one was 7/10 I'd say.
Word Count: ~52,500
Kristie's Total Points: 422,748
Man I usually don't read this much. But I'm in it to win it, thanks book club!
4 comments:
How I ever gonna catch up now? I'm beating Mitch though. He is definitely in the loser category.
Should we set some parameters for book club? Like sessions or something and if you win the session then the losers have to send you presents or photoshop pictures of you with cats or something? Otherwise it just goes on forever and nobody wins.
I bet Mitch will show up at the last minute having read a single one-million-word book.
I like the parameters idea. We could do continuous races to a million words, after which the counts start over, or we can set a deadline where whoever has the most points at that time wins. I'd prefer a race to a million, because deadlines suck. You know what else has deadlines? Work. Taxes. Library book due dates.
Losers have to draw or make something awesome in photoshop to celebrate the winner's victory, then post it to the blog so everyone can see.
Although presents are also good. Especially if they're vegan chocolate.
AND/OR winner goes to the lightning round, where they have to read a (short) book of the loser's choice.
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