Tag Archives: Slaughterhouse-Five

Looking Back at 2011 | A Year Through Books

02 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by in 50 Books A Year, Book Challenges, Book News

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It’s that time of year again folks, a fresh new year. We’ll all be setting ourselves fresh new reading challenges, so it’s the perfect moment to look back at 2011 and see what we have accomplished and how we can further improve on our performances. I see that throughout the year I’ve discovered how some of heavyweights like ‘Beowulf’ are not all what they are cut out to be. Yet a penny dreadful like ‘Sweeney Todd’ can turn out to be a surprisingly solid five-star read!

A way to do this is to looks at goodreads.com’s ‘2011 Reading Challenge’. Being a slow reader, my personal record has never gone past more than 50 books, yet I was determined to do better. And I did, I managed to read 72 books. I’m thrilled! For 2012 I’n trying a tentative 70!

Here’s my selective reading journey for 2011:

2011 Reading Challenge

5 Star Reads

White Oleander – Janet Fitch
The Snow Goose – Paul Gallico
Man in the Dark – Paul Auster
Peter Pan – JM Barrie
Beginners – Raymond Carver
The Cellist of Sarajevo – Steven Galloway
Marvels – Kurt Busiek
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Schaffer
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
The Legend of the Sleey Hollow – Washington Irving
The Tales of Bejamin Bunny – Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Peter Rabbit – Beatrix Potter
Labyrinths – JL Borges
A House of Pomegranates – Oscar Wilde
Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
Sweeney Todd – Anonymous
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Venus in Furs – Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

4 Star Reads

Prisoner of Zenda – Anthony Hope
The Angel’s Game – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Nazi Literature in the Americas – Roberto Bolano
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
2BR02B – Kurt Vonnegut
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Doll Short Stories – Daphne du Maurier
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Aesop’s Fables – Aesop

3 Star Reads

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Octopussy and the Living Daylights – Ian Fleming
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – A. Solzhenitsyn
Kung Fu Trip – Benjamin Zephaniah
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
The Informers – Brett Easton Ellis
Point Omega – Don DeLillo
Wolverine: Origins – Paul Jenkins
The Spy Who Loved Me – Ian Fleming
The Summer Without Men – Siri Hustvedt
Dune – Frank Herbert
First Love, Last Rites – Ian McEwan
Dr. Faustus – Christopher Marlowe
Japanese Fairy Tales – Theodora Yei Ozaki
English Fairy Tales – Joseph Jacobs
Grimms Fairy Tales – Brothers Grimm
Beowulf – Anonymous
The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith

2 Star Reads

Tales of Freedom – Ben Okri
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Civil War – Mark Millar
Florence and Giles – John Harding

1 Star Reads

Lost World – Patricia Melo
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur – Violette LeDuc
Lost Souls – Poppy Z Brite

So, how was your reading year? I hope you had an interesting one, and good luck for all the 2012 challenges.

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Book Review | ‘2BR02B’ by Kurt Vonnegut

20 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by in Book Review, Excerpts

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2BR02B2BR02B by Kurt Vonnegut

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Your city thanks you; your country thanks you; your planet thanks you. But the deepest thanks of all is from future generations.”

In the not so distant future, immortality has become a reality. The proverbial fount of youth has been discovered (or rather ‘engineered’) by scientists. In a world where the average lifespan of a human is approx. 140 years, natural death is rare and far between (no terrible diseases, no aging). In fact, the only way people ever actually ‘die’, is through choice. In a world where youth is on tap, you’d think it would be a paradise, but not so. In a little over 16 pages, Vonnegut shows us the stark realities of over-population and what happens when mere mortals send the grim reaper on a semi-permanent sabbatical. Told from Vonneguts’ trademark humourous perspective, we are taken straight to a New York maternity clinic and shown the absurd consequences of playing god.

The dilemma we are presented with is that of an expectant father. As his wife is set to give birth to not one, but three babies, he begins to have very dark thoughts. In a society where life has become almost unlimited, the law regulates childbirth with an iron fist. Since ‘deaths’ are on a volunteer basis, birth-control has taken on a whole new dimension. The tragi-comedy here is whether our poor protagonist can find three people ‘willing’ to commit state-endorsed suicide so that his children can be born.

This extremely short story is well-written and best enjoyed either as an audio file or in e-book form. I found this gem through the librivox archives, and since listening to it have realised that it is available in many different formats. I really enjoyed this story, as it displays Vonnegut’s narrative strengths beautifully. The ending was particularly good, very punchy and to the point (as all v. short stories should be in my opinion).

This is short fiction at it’s best and no one should pass up the opportunity to experience it. The story only takes a few minutes to get through, but contains a powerful message that marries the present culture of youth-obsessed ‘body-beautiful’ with China’s own strict ‘birth-control’ regime. It seems the seeds of such a scenario already exist in world society, and that my friend, is scary stuff indeed.
View all my reviews

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