Vonnegut

I've never really had an interest in Kurt Vonnegut. My friend Sam was super sad when Kurt died. Sam has always been an integral part of my life - very influential. We've gotten each other into movies, books, music, games, etc...so I thought, "well, if Sam likes him then I might like him, too!"

Since summer has officially begun, I made a huge list of books I want to read this summer and started checking them out from the library. I currently have six thick, brand-new-to-me books sitting on the coffee table in front of me. Words cannot describe how excited I am to dive into them. Books make me feel like nothing else does - I love reading them, especially if they're new...but that's a blog post for another time (I WILL come back to this, promise).

I finished the first book that came into the library, A Man Without a Country, in an hour yesterday. While I was work. The way the library request system works in the St. Louis Public Library is that you request a bunch of books (online, in my case), and they slowly trickle in, to the location where you will pick them up. There is usually no telling which books will arrive first. I wish, in this case, it would have been a different Vonnegut book, as this was the last book that he had ever written - but at the same time, I think it was a fantastic introduction to the writer.

Vonnegut is brilliant, in my mind, and I've only read 127 pages of his work. Cat's Cradle is sitting here, along with some Herb Caen books and (don't shoot me) part of the Shopaholic series. Slaughterhouse-Five should be in within the next few days and Breakfast of Champions will be soon behind. I am SO excited to get into Vonnegut land.

A Man Without a Country inspired me to begin a QUOTES book. A couple of years ago, in September, I was at Target and I saw a whole stack of Composition notebooks (my notebook of choice) on sale for like 50 cents each. I grabbed ten of them and have slowly been writing through each. I got a new one out today, labeled it QUOTES and decided to write quotes from books, movies, websites, really anything that inspires me. Vonnegut was the first one inside. What a lucky duck!

One of my favorites from A Man Without a Country:

"Here's the news: I'm going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only 12 years old, I have never chain-smoked anything besides unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me.

But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick, and Colon."

Glorious.



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