Today I finished re-reading Kurt Vonnegut jr’s Slaughter-House Five for about the fifth or sixth time. Even considering that I pretty much know the book by heart now I still love reading it again and again. it is very easily high up on my list of favorite all-time books and Vonnegut himself might be in the top five of my all-time favorite authors (if not actually being my solely favorite author).
I won’t claim that I really got anything new from the book this time around. As usually I just appreciated its wit and wisdom. As in the past readings I finished the book feeling a mixture of great happiness and positinve outlook on life while at the same time feeling terribly sad and despaining about the way the world is. Vonnegut had possibly the most amazing ability at creating this sense of bittersweetness in his stories.
Besides Slaughter-House Five I also bought his short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House on Saturday. Welcome to the Monkey House has probably one of my all-time favorite short stories in it, that onebeing “Harrison Bergeron.” In fact it was reading “Harrison Bergeron” my freshman year of college which really got me started with loving the works of Kurt Vonnegut. I had read Slaughter-House Five as a freshman in high school but something about it had been lost on me back then and so it would take another four years before I re-discovered it and found the real genius of Vonnegut.
I have not read eveyone of his books (though I’d greatly like to). I hope I can get to them all in the not too distant future.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. fell down a flight of stairs my junior year of college and only a few short days after that died. So it goes.
