I didn’t remember a single thing about this book. With both Deadeye Dick and Slaughterhouse-Five the plot and characters reconstructed themselves in my memory, but with this book it was as though I had never laid eyes on it before. It was not so good as the other two books, although Vonnegut was younger when he wrote it, and I’ve heard that it was his first “serious” work. The click-clack rhythm that I noted in others didn’t seem to be quite there yet, and a good deal of the satire seemed underdeveloped or tacked on as an afterthought. In some ways it reminded me of Christoper Moore’s Island of the Sequined Love Nun, but far more dire, and far less obviously funny. The Bokononist religion turned out to be more interesting (and to make more sense) than I was expecting, but ultimately it didn’t seem to have as significant an impact on the action and obvious themes of the book as it should have, given how saturated the pages are with it. I haven’t read any of Vonnegut’s works before this one, but while the potential of his later books is clearly visible here, it is also clearly only potential at this point. Maybe my standards are artificially high, I don’t know.
Next, something deliberately lighter, Terry Pratchett’s The Light Fantastic.
