Well, this certainly took longer than anticipated. It's been on my list for 3 years. And I'm a reader.
The tricky part was, every list I saw had different works listed. Then, even more difficult, some of them seemed unavailable. In particular, his plays. So, I read everything I could absolutely find... by searching and ordering on Amazon.
Since I did not keep tidy notes, I will not go through each book and review it. Here is a general review for any of the ones I read: "Vonnegut is so wonderfully, simply, funnily insightful. I loved this book."
Instead, here is a favorite quote from each. I do write in books, so this was a little easier to do. I tried to just include a few but it felt a disservice to the other books I loved so dearly.
One other note: the "new" doctoral student in me needed to list citation in APA format but it's only half-assed.
Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
(SH5 was my first Vonnegut reading. It also contains my longest favorite quote. I remember posting this quote -- as much as would fit -- as my AIM away message in the week after 9/11.)
"Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
"American plans, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter plans few at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
"The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
"***
"When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
"The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce to perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed" (Vonnegut, 1969, pp. 93-95)
Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday!
(This is my FAVORITE BOOK OF ALL TIME.)
"'This is a very bad book you're writing,' I said to myself behind my
leaks.
"'I know,' I said.
"'You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did,' I said.
"'I know,' I said" (Vonnegut, 1973, p.198).
Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
"Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore" (Vonnegut, 1981, p. 196).
Armageddon in Retrospect
"'The wreckers against the builders!' said Elmer. 'There's the whole story of life!'" (Vonnegut, 2008, p. 124).
We Are What We Pretend to Be
"My father did with words what Fred Astaire did with his body, something out of this world that no one else could possibly pull off. Even as an old man my defied gravity and did the audacious thing of creating something out of nothing" (Nannette Vonnegut, Vonnegut, 2012, p. xiii).
Galapagos
"In a sense, too, this man had already been hit by a meteorite: by the murder of his mother by his father. And his feeling that life was a meaningless nightmare, with nobody watching or caring what was going on, was actually quite familiar to me.
"That was how I felt after I shot a grandmother in Vietnam. She was as toothless and bent over as Mary Hepburn would be at the end of her life. I shot her because she had just killed my best friend and my worst enemy in my platoon with a single hand-grenade."
"This episode made me sorry to be alive, made me envy stones. I would rather have been a stone at the service of the Natural Order" (Vonnegut, 1985, p. 134).
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
"' Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--:
"'God damn it, you've got to be kind'" (Vonnegut, 1965, p,. 129).
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
"...an ideal so Earthbound and unmajestic that I never capitalize it. As I have used it here, 'humanist' is nothing more supernatural than a handy synonym for 'good citizenship and common decency'" (Vonnegut, 1999, p. 12).
Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons
"Dear Reader:
"The title of this book is composed of three words from my novel
Cat's Cradle. A
wampeter is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point.
Foma are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: 'Prosperity is just around the corner.' A
granfalloon is a proud and meaningless association of human beings" (Vonnegut, 1965, p. xiii).
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
"My two siblings didn't like his gunplay, either. One time, I remember, my brother looked at a quail Father had shot, and he said, 'My gosh -- that's like smashing a fine Swiss watch.' My sister used to cry and refuse to eat when Father brought home game.
"Some homecoming for Odysseus!" (Vonnegut, 1970, p. x)
Bluebeard
"A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.
"The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an 'exhibitionist.'
"How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, 'Wow! Were you ever
drunk last night!" (Vonnegut, 1987, p. 82).
Mother Night
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be" (Vonnegut, 2009, p. v).
Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation about Writing
"'...literature is the only art that requires our audience to be performers. You have to be able to read and you have to be able to read awfully well. You have to read so well that you get irony! I'll say one thing meaning another, and you'll get it...'" (Vonnegut, 1999, p. 16).
Look at the Birdie
"'I suppose I'd commit suicide after a while,' I said, 'because nothing anybody's said or done has made any sense at all. The human system can only stand so much of that'" (Vonnegut, 2009, p. 43).
Hocus Pocus
"I read about Wold War II. Civilians and soldiers alike, and even little children, were proud to have played a part in it. It was impossible, seemingly, for any sort of person not to feel a part of that war, if he or she was alive while it was going on. Yes, and the suffering or death of soldiers and sailors and Marines was felt at least a little bit of everyone.
"But the Vietnam War belongs exclusively to those of us who fought in it. Nobody else had anything to do with it, supposedly. Everybody else is a pure as the driven snow. We alone are stupid and dirty, having fought such a war. When we lost it served us right for ever having started it. The night I went temporarily insane in a Chinese restaurant on Harvard Square, everybody was a big success but me" (Vonnegut, 1990, p. 165).
Bagombo Snuff Box
"Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:
"1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
"2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
"3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
"4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
"5. Start as close to the end as possible.
"6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
"7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
"8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages" (Vonnegut, 1999, p. 12).
Cat's Cradle
"As Bokonon says: 'Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God'" (Vonnegut, 1963, p. 63).
Slapstick
"Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place" (Vonnegut, 1976, p. 14).
The Sirens of Titan
"Earth was the most fertile where the most death was" (Vonnegut, 1959, p. 219).
Welcome to the Monkey House
from the short story "Harrison Bergeron" a.k.a. Atlas Shrugged in 7 pages
"The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. There weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal in every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else" (Vonnegut, 1998, p. 7).
Canary in a Cathouse
I took no notes, so here are the first and last lines. (They are all short stories. They don't ruin anything.)
"Let me begin by saying I don't know any more about where Professor Arthur Barnhouse is hiding than anyone else does" (Vonnegut, 1976, p. 7).
"He could hardly wait to see what was going to happen next" (Vonnegut, 1976, p, 160).
Fates Worse than Death
"The message I got from the play, I went on, was that it was better to love something other people might think was ugly than not to love at all" (Vonnegut, 1991, p. 68).
Jailbird
"I thanked him, andI made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger: (Vonnegut, 1979, p. 165).
Player Piano
"Finnerty shook his head. 'He'd pull me back into the center, and I'd want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.' He nodded. 'Big, undreamed-of things -- the people on the edge see them first" (Vonnegut, 2006, p. 84).
While Mortals Sleep
"The theater lights were coming on, taking from her elation and importance and love she really had no claim to" (Vonnegut, 2011, p. 88).
Deadeye Dick
"That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes" (Vonnegut, 1982, p. 6).
Letters
"I had a psychiatrist tell me that shyness is a form of hostility. They tell everybody that, you know. That was a couple years ago, so I have had a long time to think about it. I have persuaded myself that it isn't true. It's fear and laziness and realism. It's an embarrassed apology which says in effect: 'Hey -- I'm sorry, I probably don't like life as much as you do'" (Vonnegut, 2012, p. 197).
List of Works
Vonnegut, K. (1959).
The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell Publishing.
Vonnegut, K. (1963).
Cat's Cradle. New York: Dell Publishing.
Vonnegut, K. (1965).
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: Or Pearls Before Swine. New York: Dial Press.
Vonnegut, K. (1965).
Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks.
Vonnegut, K. (1969).
Slaughterhouse-Five: Or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. New York: A Delta Book.
Vonnegut, K. (1970).
Happy Birthday, Wanda June. New York: A Delta Book.
Vonnegut, K. (1973).
Breakfast of Champions: Or Goodbye Blue Monday! New York: A Delta Book.
(This is my FAVORITE BOOK OF ALL TIME.)
Vonnegut, K. (1976).
Canary in a Cathouse. New York: Bucaneer Books.
Vonnegut, K. (1976).
Slapstick. New York: Dell Publishing.
Vonnegut, K (1979).
Jailbird. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks.
Vonnegut, K. (1981).
Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks.
Vonnegut, K. (1982).
Deadeye Dick. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks.
Vonnegut, K. (1985).
Galapagos. New York: A Delta Book.
Vonnegut, K. (1987).
Bluebeard. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks.
Vonnegut, K. (1990).
Hocus Pocus. New York: Berkeley Books.
Vonnegut, K. (1991).
Fates Worse than Death. New York: Berkeley Books.
Vonnegut, K. (1998).
Welcome to the Monkey House. New York: Dell Publishing.
Vonnegut, K. (1999).
Bagombo Snuff Box. New York: Berkeley Books.
Vonnegut, K. (1999).
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian. New York: Washington Square Press.
Vonnegut, K. & Stringer, L. (1999).
Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation about Writing. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Vonnegut, K. (2006).
Player Piano. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks.
Vonnegut, K. (2008).
Armageddon in Retrospect. New York: Berkley Books.
Vonnegut, K. (2009.)
Look at the Birdie. New York: Delacorte Press.
Vonnegut, K. (2009).
Mother Night. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks.
Vonnegut, K. (2011).
While Mortals Sleep. New York: Delacorte Press.
Vonnegut, K. (2012).
Letters. New York: Delacorte Press.
Vonnegut, K. (2012).
We Are What We Pretend to Be. New York: Vanguard Press.
From the moment both my feet left the ground and every foot after that, I'd freak out. I'd swear, sweat, curse myself for thinking I'd enjoy it. I'd come down legs a little shaky, frustrated that I was being such a punk.
