(no subject)
I really need to put up a couple of literary reviews, because I'm, like, a quarter of the way through the Wheel of Time and the most I've said on it is a little bit of Twitter snarking.
Around 2007, ladyarkham loaned me a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, with instructions to read it so it could be passed along for the next person to enjoy.
Which I promptly... did not, I'm afraid, until today. I think I was expecting something with the words-per-page density of a George R.R. Martin, and instead it was quick read of an hour or two. So, you know, if you're curious, check it out!
That said, I didn't enjoy the book, and I'm not sure I can in any sense recommend it. It fits into a (small, but not empty) box of things that I intended to like, that are generally well-regarded by people similar to me, but that I don't actually enjoy when I try them.
For those of you who haven't read it, possibly because I've been sitting on a copy that was meant to be loaned to you:
Cat's Cradle follows a guy named John as he tries to find and interview the members of the family of Dr. Hoenikker, who is (in this universe) one of the inventors of the atomic bomb. John has a series of unlikely encounters along the way; in hindsight, he realizes that these encounters are acts of God, directing him towards a small group of related people tied in some great common cause. The common cause, in this case, revolves around ice-9, a seed crystal that will turn any water in contact with it into a sheet of ice that melts at well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. John understands his place in life, retroactively, because at the time of this writing he has converted to Bokononism - a religion that is explicitly made up and untrue but full of comforting lies.
Identifying the protagonists of the piece is made a bit more difficult in that none of the characters are (a) much in the way of likable, or (b) actually doing anything except wandering around and having stuff happen to them. The action all eventually converges in a little Caribbean island, home to Bokonon and several chips of ice-9, where things very quickly go very wrong.
I had kind of an odd reaction to the book, in that I didn't have much of any reaction to the book except the sense that I was supposed to react somehow - and that was a bit frustrating. I had no real affection or antipathy for any of the characters, and their relative lack of anything like proactive action made it a bit difficult to much care about anything that was happening. Many reviews of Vonnegut describe him as a hilarious writer, and while there were a couple of places that made me smile a bit - there's a bit of humor with a book index, for instance - that was about the limit of it. It felt very much like a Shaggy Dog Story to me - things happened, and then other things happened, and then very bad things happened, and at the end there didn't seem to be much of a reason to care.
The other problem, I think, is that the villains of the piece - insofar as there are any - seem to be scientists, including Hoenikker. Hoenikker is repeatedly described as essentially cut off from the rest of humanity, thinking about absolutely anything that interests him with no real regard for the practical consequences of the truths he discovers. Bokononism is set up as something of an opposite number; it completely disregards truth in favor of trying to make life more humane.
The difficulty here is that, if this is the fundamental conflict, I'm thoroughly on the side of the scientists. The pure research labs described in the book sound pretty cool; when characters claim that truth is a source of wealth (in what is, I think, supposed to be a ridiculous assertion), I find myself agreeing with them. The descriptions of what ice-9 is, and how it works, are about the most interesting parts - and when Hoenikker is described as tearing off after stacks of oranges or cannonballs in search of inspiration, I can't help but sympathize a little.
Whereas Bokononism... well, if it's not true, what use is it?
Around 2007, ladyarkham loaned me a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, with instructions to read it so it could be passed along for the next person to enjoy.
Which I promptly... did not, I'm afraid, until today. I think I was expecting something with the words-per-page density of a George R.R. Martin, and instead it was quick read of an hour or two. So, you know, if you're curious, check it out!
That said, I didn't enjoy the book, and I'm not sure I can in any sense recommend it. It fits into a (small, but not empty) box of things that I intended to like, that are generally well-regarded by people similar to me, but that I don't actually enjoy when I try them.
For those of you who haven't read it, possibly because I've been sitting on a copy that was meant to be loaned to you:
Cat's Cradle follows a guy named John as he tries to find and interview the members of the family of Dr. Hoenikker, who is (in this universe) one of the inventors of the atomic bomb. John has a series of unlikely encounters along the way; in hindsight, he realizes that these encounters are acts of God, directing him towards a small group of related people tied in some great common cause. The common cause, in this case, revolves around ice-9, a seed crystal that will turn any water in contact with it into a sheet of ice that melts at well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. John understands his place in life, retroactively, because at the time of this writing he has converted to Bokononism - a religion that is explicitly made up and untrue but full of comforting lies.
Identifying the protagonists of the piece is made a bit more difficult in that none of the characters are (a) much in the way of likable, or (b) actually doing anything except wandering around and having stuff happen to them. The action all eventually converges in a little Caribbean island, home to Bokonon and several chips of ice-9, where things very quickly go very wrong.
I had kind of an odd reaction to the book, in that I didn't have much of any reaction to the book except the sense that I was supposed to react somehow - and that was a bit frustrating. I had no real affection or antipathy for any of the characters, and their relative lack of anything like proactive action made it a bit difficult to much care about anything that was happening. Many reviews of Vonnegut describe him as a hilarious writer, and while there were a couple of places that made me smile a bit - there's a bit of humor with a book index, for instance - that was about the limit of it. It felt very much like a Shaggy Dog Story to me - things happened, and then other things happened, and then very bad things happened, and at the end there didn't seem to be much of a reason to care.
The other problem, I think, is that the villains of the piece - insofar as there are any - seem to be scientists, including Hoenikker. Hoenikker is repeatedly described as essentially cut off from the rest of humanity, thinking about absolutely anything that interests him with no real regard for the practical consequences of the truths he discovers. Bokononism is set up as something of an opposite number; it completely disregards truth in favor of trying to make life more humane.
The difficulty here is that, if this is the fundamental conflict, I'm thoroughly on the side of the scientists. The pure research labs described in the book sound pretty cool; when characters claim that truth is a source of wealth (in what is, I think, supposed to be a ridiculous assertion), I find myself agreeing with them. The descriptions of what ice-9 is, and how it works, are about the most interesting parts - and when Hoenikker is described as tearing off after stacks of oranges or cannonballs in search of inspiration, I can't help but sympathize a little.
Whereas Bokononism... well, if it's not true, what use is it?