My goal is to read a novel a week in 2015. I’ve made it to 13.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
This book reeks of death. So it goes. And goes again and again.
It gives you vertigo. It broods over you as you read it. You lay on your back and hold the book over your face like a dark cloud. It’s like the Eye of Sauron staring at you, and you can’t stop staring back. It makes your mood like fog, dark fog, with a tinge of light that you’re not sure is light at all.
When you’re finished reading it perhaps you want to repeat the famous epitaph, ‘everything was beautiful and nothing hurt;’ but you know you can’t say that. And that’s the whole point. And so you just give yourself over to its quiddity.
It’s a beautiful book in its own way.
Aside from aliens and time travel, it’s about Dresden. If you don’t know about Dresden, you should. It’s a book about the ugliness of war. Something that we cannot eradicate. A fight we can’t win. And yet it seems that we should try.
