Sunday, November 6, 2011

Breakfast of Champions

My apologies for the lack of fashion-related posts. I have been so busy lately visiting other cities and working extra hours, I promise to upload pics of all my wonderful new things soon! But firstly, I finally finished reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Honestly, I found it to be a tedious read as I never quite got used to the staccato narrative littered with illustrations of the signs, animals and objects Vonnegut was describing. However, his descriptions and commentary on American society and human behaviour are spot on and well worth the read. By describing facets of modern life at a basic level, Vonnegut exposes the absurdity of the world in which we live in and the rules and reasons we create for ourselves and our society.

"Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn't think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless the really wanted to, and most of them didn't want to.
So they didn't have to."
p.13, Breakfast of Champions.

I ear marked a few other pearls of wisdom:

""You are pooped and demoralized," read Dwayne. "Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.""
p.253

"He began the five mile walk down Fairchild Boulevard - toward a tiny amber dot at the other end. The dot was the Midland City Center for the Arts. He would make it grow bigger by walking toward it. When his walking had made it big enough, it would swallow him up. There would be food inside."
p. 284

""Mr. Trout - Kilgore -" I said, "I hold in my hand a symbol of wholeness and harmony and nourishment. It is Oriental in its simplicity, but we are Americans, Kilgore, and not Chinamen. We Americans require symbols which are richly colored and three-dimensional and juicy. Most of all, we hunger for symbols which have not been poisoned by great sins our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning.
"Look up, Mr. Trout," I said, and I waited patiently.
"Kilgore-?"
The old man looked up, and he had my father's wasted face when my father was a widower - when my father was an old old man.
He saw that I held an apple in my hand."
p.293

I'm about to start Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five which should be just as interesting and thought-provoking. If you have any other book recommendations, send them my way!

2 comments:

  1. ooh I'll have to give this one a read! I've read Slaughterhouse Five and enjoyed it.

    if you like dystopian tales, I would HIGHLY recommend Wind Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. INCREDIBLE.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm really enjoying Slaughterhouse Five so far. And I remember you mentioning Wind Up Girl on your blog, I'll have to borrow it from you soon (assuming you own it?). :)

    ReplyDelete