Lit-Savvy Sunday: June 16

I am always looking for new books to read, as evident by my 127-books-long To Read list on Good Reads.  As Sunday makes a great rest day, every Sunday I'll rest from my crochet work to share my thoughts on what I'm reading. Sometimes my biggest struggle is just affording new books (much like yarn, you just want it all) but soon I'll have a public library nearby. Please, join the conversation and tell me what you're reading, from deep philosophical reads to light-hearted romance novels to violent fantasies and beyond, I love it all. Add a link to a post if you wrote up some thoughts on it and I'll be sure to check it out.

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Chapters One - Five

Slaughterhouse Five is about war, life, and time travel.

The first chapter is a little slow while the author works on introducing the main character, but it picks up after that. There were a few times I begrudgingly set the book down when it was time to leave the house.

The book is written to be a series of events, but none of them are in chronological order. This really puts emphasis on the way the Tralfamadorians see time, because by time you read about one event, you already know what happens to all of those characters thirty years from now, the same way the Tralfamadorians already know everything that ever has and ever will happen. The Tralfamadorians, by the way, are aliens. In essence, this book is screaming, "Look at the big picture, you idiot!" Death doesn't matter any more than spilled milk matters in the grand scheme of things. We're here and then we're not but someone else is. So it goes.

Quotes:

"The dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is, 'So it goes.'"

"The flaw in the Christ stories ... was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought ...: Oh boy- they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes."

"There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."