Thanks Dave. Nice to have a reading list so I can review what I've missed and decide what I want to read again.

Now, how about finding a place on the web for the Complete Smart Feller? eh?

Your friend,

Noam

How did I know about this article until now. Eggers talking about Vonnegut!!!!!

Instead of saying, "I swear on a stack of bibles." to prove what I am about to say is absolutely true. I say, "I swear on a stack of Kurt Vonnegut books." I am sure Kurt would have found it funny that I usually lie right after I say that.

I thought he would just live forever. I am going to miss him.

well, I guess "subhead" is in the newspaper; "subtitle," though, is at a foreign flick ...

Whatever it's called, I'm fairly certain the tertiary title is not merely "A Dance With Death" but "A Duty-Dance With Death."

I don't know if that's funny or merely arch.

...which is one of my favorites.

And I submit that Cat's Cradle is a better place to start for the uninitiated than Slaughter House 5.

Vonnegut also wrote Canary in a Cathouse; Happy Birthday, Wanda June; Wampeters Foma & Granfalloons; and Between Time and Timbuktu or Prometheus-5 (with his 2nd wife, Jill Krementz the photographer).

And Mother Night is actually very funny, but in a way different from Vonnegut's usual humor; and it is all about WWII, which was missed too.

...is canonical, if anything is. His most prescient work, and one of the most trenchant. In it, a complete moron becomes the President of the US. (Clearly, Vonnegut did not limit himself to fiction.)

It was made into a Canadian TV movie in '95, with Sean Astin (Samwise!) as the hero.

Apparently, Cypress Films is planning a DVD release.

Or was he just critiquing Vonnegut's prose at face value?

Mr. Eggers states, "Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few writers in this guide that I can be sure that everyone has already read."

Unfortunately I just polled the newsroom where I work and none of the reporters (all under 31) had read any of his books. What a tragedy!

I hit the local used-bookstore and found only one used Vonnegut; Slapstick. Hopefully I can convince them to pass it around but they don't seem too enthusiastic.

I'd rate this review as A/Ar/-F/S(in my mind only)--VF.

And though I'm a wee 25, I have to agree with the previous comment on Harrison Bergeron. A canonical short story, often sadly overlooked.

How could you possibly not list "Fahrenheit 451" as one of Mr Vonnegut's most timely and timeless novels? A terrifying machine of the State that pursues people who dare to hide books within a cupboard or other secret place, out of sight of the very men and women who were previously entrusted to put out fires to save lives but who are, in the story, charged with starting the fires that will now destroy thought and ideas, literally, in the form of books? This is his underlying theme! Yeesh!

Maybe he didn't list it because Vonnegut didn't write it - Ray Bradbury did.

So what if he's "related" to both Al Gore and the Kennedys? He's critical of both. But I would agree with you that he is wrong about Kurt Vonnegut, who wasn't the worst writer in America at that time. But he was the worst celebrated writer, ever. His only decent novel was Mother Night, and his only good short story was the aforementioned Harrison Bergeron. That's more than a clear majority of writers can boast, but as boasts go it doesn't justify all the lionizing.

I read Vonnegut as a teenager and into my 20's. I'm a much better person now than I would ever have been as a result of reading him. He will be missed.

I also came across him as a teen (figuratively, not literally). Cat's Cradle it was. Couldn't ask for a better primer to irreverence and a healthy disrespect for received wisdom. Ended up reading all that he'd written at that time by the time I was 20. Just in constant AWE that someone could say those things. The man drew a picture of an asshole in "Breakfast of Champions" in case you didn't know what one looked like (Maybe that is what Gore Vidal was referring to?) Pretty much the linchpin of my sense of humor from there on out. Everything can make you laugh or cry and you've got to take see it skewed.

P.S. I also agree Cat's Cradle is the best starter book. 128 pages, 131 chapters (or somewhere there abouts.) ALTHOUGH the $!$%#$ book-publishers now will only sell the new ver. that is over 200 pages in trade paperback size for around 12$ Do yourself a favor, buy an older ver. used from Amazon or some such.

I first read Kurt Vonnegut and Ayn Rand as a teenager, and both stuck with me like hot glue. Now getting old, I sure hope I absorbed the ethos of the first more than the second. That's all.

What, did Eggers bang this out over a bowl of Grape Nuts? Jesus Christ, Salon, you disappoint.

Kurt Vonnegut's work, like his life, seemed to have it both ways. He was an outspoken humanist and a professional empath who wore the suffering of the world -- and our silly wars in particular -- on his deeply-lined and curiously whiskered face. But his work always returned to his familiar tropes of humanity's bungling; our over-reaching, self-delusion and self-destruction. It's this type of lived-in contradiction that can only make a life-long love affair with unfiltered Pall Malls seem charming. Political. Defiant.

Vonnegut was certainly all of those and more. He was also something of a radical, both in his early experimentation with the novelistic form, and in his vehement inability to bullshit us to the very end. A rare thing indeed. Many of his readers probably remember the feeling of wild-epiphany upon discovering his work at a young age. It seems odd now at the shit-heel end of post-history, when we've seen nationalistic hubris and bureaucratic doublespeak and things even Vonnegut couldn't have dreamed up in his wildest science-fiction (and many things he did) become the norm, but there was a time when his sarcastic petulance and world-weary frustration, not to mention his stylistic innovations, were the avant garde. Albeit a highly palatable, and highly readable version of it. In his own way Vonnegut begot Barthelme and Pynchon who begot Foster Wallace who begot Mcsweeney's who begot Saunders and the essential mind-set of the entire generation of literate wise-ass media of which the Dig is a part. In a way, Vonnegut built this website.

Paging through some of my old copies of Vonnegut's novels, some great, some merely genuinely amusing, I'm reminded of one of the rules he laid out for writing fiction:

"Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted."

Would he were here now, at the top of his game, to continue giving us such diversions.

http://theethicalscumbag.blogspot.com/