The World's Fair

How great is this book? It's that great, that's how much.

But beyond superficial (and meaningless) qualifiers like "great," this book does a remarkable job of fascinating me, interesting students, and standing alone as entertaining fiction. I use it in my class on Science, Technology, and Progress, and since I just re-ordered it for the new semester it reminded to make a point of asking how to characterize a book that you can read a dozen times and still enjoy.

I was looking up some quotes and old reviews, and realized that The Vonnegut Web is an extraordinary site, collecting, collating, and what not, for all of his work. Their Cat's Cradle page is remarkable. And I love the 1963 New York Times review by Terry Southern, who says:

Like the best of contemporary satire, it is work of a far more engaging and meaningful order than the melodramatic tripe which most critics seem to consider ''serious.''

So I think what amazes me about the simplicity of the story, and the simplicity of the writing, and yet the profundity of all that we end up talking about in class - and that's after those earlier years, when I'd talk about the book just with friends - is that it is in that class of book that's about everything. I'm sure that anyone who has a book they love also ends up considering it to be about everything, but some books are actually about everything, even without deliberating on them for long enough that you can get anything in the world out of it. Or so it seems to me. But of those kinds of books - Joyce's Ulysses, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Martin's Cruel Shoes-- Vonnegut's is the most accessible and fun.

The idea of the Karass, the status of the scientist, the purpose of knowledge, the apocalyptic parable. How about all that? The ubiquitous question, Progress towards what?

Nothing big here. Just a guy who likes a book.