Hi guys. It's almost ten am. I was not planning to get up this early. Also, my dog has eaten all the christmas stocking stuffers. So I needed some cheering up. This should help.
So, last week, I was talking to my dad about books I had been reading recently, and how now that I was finished with all of them, I had nothing to read but the trashy teen novel I was given for free after volunteering at Trick or Trolley. He promptly took me to his inner sanctum (i.e the workout room/ library/ art studio/ place where he keeps his nice suits) and loaded me up with four books that he thought I would like. There was The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, which I knew nothing about but was attracted to by the epic red clouds on the cover. There was also The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton, which didn't really look like the devastatingly beautiful and thoughtful fiction I was looking for. The third book was a couple of short stories by J.D Salinger. I actually did start to read that one, but I remembered my previous attempts of reading two books by the same author in succession usually just makes me tire of the author's writing style and compare it to the first book I read. Since nothing can be compared to Catcher in the Rye, I resolved to save the book for a later date. The final book was called Breakfast of Champions. It's written by Kurt Vonnegut, who can be most easily identified by his book Slaughterhouse Five.
I read a good third of Breakfast of Champions before finally setting it down in temporary defeat. This book is weird. First of all, the narrator of the book refers to the way we know the planet Earth as a thing of the past, so it can only be assumed that this book is being written by someone who lives in the future but is old enough to remember everything from the past, though nobody else he is addressing seems to. He feels the need to explain to whoever his audience is what certain mundane things are, things that we of this time period would be very familiar with. He also draws what these things are. There are these crude little illustrations in the book. One of them is a butt hole. I am extremely perplexed as to why these people that the narrator is addressing wouldn't even be aware of what a butt hole looks like. He drew it like an asterisk. So, weird, yes, but also hilarious. Also, this narrator keeps talking about things like he has made them. I'm beginning to theorize that this book is supposed to have been written by God, or the Creator of the Universe, as characters in the book call him. It's an interesting idea, I must admit, but interesting as it is, it also makes the book really confusing.
The narrator is not the only weird part of the book. One of the main characters is a writer of science fiction stories named Kilgore Trout. Several times so far, the book has gone into long descriptions of his stories. They are so long, in fact, that they make me forget the actual plot of the book and so I think that this is the plot, and then it goes back into some guy driving to a Holiday Inn and I'm more confused than ever. The stories are, in my opinion, a lot more entertaining than the actual plot of the book. All about aliens who go to see porn that's really just a family eating for hours and hours and then throwing a bunch of leftovers away. It's really, really interesting. The book will probably get more interesting as it progresses, but as of now, it's just confusing.
I read Breakfast of Champions for a lot of the day yesterday, but at bedtime, I was beginning a chapter and I finally gave up. I'm going to save this book for when I'm in the right frame of mind, because right now it's just like I took a bunch of Nyquil and I'm having fever dreams. I started reading Carrie instead, which I know I like and am never confused by. I'll probably write about it tomorrow. As for now, sleep tight, ya morons.
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