"Slaughter House Five" 

Kurt Vonnegut
Published 1969  
I know this a long review but please read it because I highly recommend this book!! And this is why I chose to read the top 100 novels because I wouldn't have had this experience otherwise. 

What can I say, I love Kurt Vonnegut!  His frank, dark and often self deprecating humor causes a desire in the reader to literally ingest "every word".  It truly is a 2 a.m. book that is put down when your contact lenses are burning and you're out of eye drops.   Vonnegut uses his past in WWII as a p.o.w. in a German Camp and the bombing of Dresden as one of the many dimensions experienced by Billy Pilgrim (the protagonist).  
Billy Pilgrim is an ordinary man from Iliad, New York.  He's a scrawny pipe of a guy, weak, weary and prematurely gray/bald in his twenties.  His time traveling starts during the war, as he has crossed enemy lines with 2 scouts and a pain in the ass named Roland Weary who is described by Vonnegut as eighteen and from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
  "He had been unpopular in Pittsburgh.  He had been unpopular because he was stupid and fat and mean, and smelled like bacon no matter how much he washed.  He was always being ditched in Pittsburgh by people who did not want him with them. When Weary was ditched, he would find somebody who was even more unpopular than himself, and he would horse around with that person for a while, pretending to be friendly. And then he would find some pretext for beating the shit out of him."  

When Billy is about to be 'done in' by the bloated Roland, Germans come along and capture both of them sending them to Dresden where they are housed in "Slaughter House Number Five".  Billy time travels to all different points in his life.  
The Tralfamadorians  (aliens) show up at a certain time in Billy's life and kidnap him to guide him through his  fourth dimension experiences.
Billy can visit any point he would like to in his life. The Tralfamadorian view of life can be described as such: 

"All moments past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.  The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance.  They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.  It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.  When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.....So it goes." 
I like that! 

Billy can be riding in the train as a p.o.w and the next moment he is visiting :
*His forties as a successful Optometrist.
*His marriage to the Senior Optometrist ample daughter Valencia.
*Different points in his children's  lives.  
*Visiting an impatient mental institution reading Sci-Fi novels by Kilgore Trout
*Has an airplane accident
*His wife dies of carbon monoxide inhalation
*Starts going on radio talk shows revealing his times as a captive of the Trafamadorians.  When he was kept naked in a Zoo.  

He had to be kept in a Zoo, where the conditions of earth were simulated.  He was naked at all times, but his Zoo environment was quite nice with furniture and modern appliances stolen by the Tralfamamdorians from 'Sears and Roebuck'.  At all times he has a Tralfamdorian audience, which at least leads Billy to finally have 'body confidence' because they think everything he does is just the most spectacular thing they've ever seen (especially when he uses the bathroom).  But just Billy isn't enough, so the ever considerate and accommodating Tralfs provide Billy with a partner to mate with, Montana Wildhack (a B movie actress), "and so it goes".  

This novel was so enjoyable that I was laughing aloud or shaking my head every few pages.  But on the flip side, it demonstrates the inhumanity of war/life in it's harshest form:  
"I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time.  This was true.  Billy saw the boiled bodies in Dresden.  And I have lit my way in a prison at night with candles from the fat of human beings who were butchered by the brother and fathers of those schoolgirls who were boiled.  Earthlings must be the terrors of the Universe!"
"Slaughter House Five"......Read It!   

MY BOYS AND HALLOWEEN!

It's almost the witching hour when I will go out with my two little spirits and watch them engorge themselves with sugar until they fall into a diabetic coma!!  Of course this happens only after they have organized their candy, made strategic trades and then bounced off every wall like ping pong balls. Then they literally collapse in a heap with chocolate smeared all over their faces!  It's quite scary to see!  They are both "Scream".  I'm not sure what happened to the cute little costumes: bumble bees, Zurg, Buzz Light Year, Winnie the Pooh, etc.  Now it is all about blood, gore and ....blood and gore!  They're both obesessed with Chucky even though they've never seen the movie and keep referring to "it" as a "she".  I've corrected them and told them, "No, Chucky is a he, hence there would not be a sequel entitled 'Bride of Chucky'."  They don't seem to understand what I'm saying and go about their business with one pretending to be Chucky while the other says, "Chucky doesn't have an axe, that's not fair.  She only has a kitchen knife!"  

Anyway, finished "Slaughter House Five" and absolutely loved it so review to follow.  Happy Halloween All, keep checking your sugar count!   

ALIENS, TIME WARPS, B-MOVIE ACTRESSES!! YIKES!!

Apparently, Slaughter House-Five (as the title may suggest) is on board for the Halloween festivities!  What could be scarier than aliens, time warps and B-Movie actresses??? This novel, is number 18 on the list!  Slaughter House-Five, like Ulysses, has a nonlinear narrative, which should prove to be exciting and easy to follow.  The main character is Billy Pilgrim who is captured by the Germans during WWII .  Here is a little description of what happens then...
Billy " is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. They exhibit him in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They believe in predestination. They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the correctness of their theories."
Okay, I gotta go!  I  have a book to read!!

 

VAMPIRE VEXATION

Vexation: (noun) 15th century: troubling/irritation/affliction
Apparently Ann Rice is at it again with her new book "Angel Time".  What does this have to do with my endeavor to read the top one hundred list, absolutely nothing!  But, since I'm deciding what new book to read today I figured I'd toss some ideas around in regards to this "VAMPIRE" vexation I have!  Which, apparently Rice now shares since her conversion to Catholicism.  I guess her new character, an "angel", has to go around cleaning up this vampire mess she made back in the 90's.  
All of sudden the new big thing is Vampires!  (New??)  I thought Bram Stoker pretty much summed it up, but then Ann Rice came out with "Interview With A Vampire"  and everyone was blood lusting to be bit by Lestat and/or Louis depending on one's taste.  



 I'll admit, I was a huge Rice fan and then I recall in one of the later books Lestat suctioning himself back together out of nosophoros primordial goo under some house and then becoming a rock star and that's when I said, "Okay, too much suspension of disbelief for me!"  Now here we are with all these new vampire series piggy backing off each other getting anemically worse by the second.  I just took my kids to "Where The Wild Things Are" (great book/great movie), and  on the marquee I saw a new movie entitled, you guessed it, "Vampires".  There is something in the simplicity isn't there?  
My spouse said this post is too negative!  Maybe it's the time of year???

BEELZEBUB AKA "THE LORD OF THE FLIES"

"The title is said to be a reference to the Hebrew name of Beelzebub (בעל זבוב, Ba’al-zvuv, “god of the fly”, “host of the fly”, or literally “Lord of Flies”), a name sometimes used as a synonym for Satan. The title of the book, in turn, has itself become a metaphor for a power struggle in a chaotic situation."

A CHAOTIC SITUATION:  Living on an island can sometimes leave you with a condition called "Island Fever" which I am currently suffering from.  I long for civilization and the streets of Manhattan.  Sometimes I have pondered, what would happen with all this H1N1 or some other scary disease (maybe a zombie type) broke out and we were stuck here in the middle of the Pacific.  Things would get downright hairy super fast!  Of course there would be no imports so the residents would have to survive off the land.  Now, for native Hawaiians this probably wouldn't be that big of a deal.  Most Hawaiians know all the edible fish, fruits, vegetables etc.  And, of course there are wild boar on the island just like in "Lord of The Flies".  Things would get primitive pretty quick and different "camps" would be established as to who had access to what.  There are more components to this scenario not being a native Hawaiian but I can't get into that!

People come in all varieties and some are more prone to the democratic process, organization, and logic (Ralph, Piggy and Simon).  Others are more prone to survival of the fittest (Jack Merridew & Co.).  I say, a person needs a certain balance of each.  After all, you can have a 160 IQ and not a lick of street smarts.  If my family was hungry I'd definitely do in a pig or two without losing much sleep.  The chaos isn't in the hunting; it's in the social organization of people. Brawn over brains seems to prevail in these types of survival circumstances.  It's a wonder that we're as civilized as we are, but of course all one has to do  is turn on the news for that warm and fuzzy feeling to go away.  

There have been many debates and books on this topic, social/political order and the nature of man,  (Animal Farm, etc).  I'm having a hard go of it trying to get into this book (again, one I read in high school) because it isn't a novel concept in 2009 like it was during the "Cold War".  And, when I was a teacher in Maine, I taught at the school that serviced all the incarcerated (lock downed) kids in the state of Maine.  It was "Lord Of The Flies" everyday in that place.  I'm "flied" out! 

SEX IN THE CITY? "SISTER CARRIE" BRADSHAW

If you're a "Sex In The City" fan like I am, you're obsessed with watching Carrie Bradshaw's suave success as a columnist with a major New York paper.  She journals about her life and her friends and all that encompasses life in Manhattan.  Besides that, they are slaves to fashion, covetously looking at Jimmy Choo shoes at $5000 that are a must have.  I guess I like watching it so much because A) it is hilarious and B) it is nice to imagine that I could just walk into some high end boutique and slip into an Oscar de la Renta creation.  Not that I don't think  the cost of fashion is ridiculous, but I do love the art.  
So, what does this have to do with "Sister Carrie" by Theodore Dreiser, which was first published in 1900?  The first sketches of life in Chicago find Carrie at her sister's austere, barely meat and potatoes flat.  Her sister and her dullard blank staring cow faced husband are as much fun as getting a Brazilian wax! Carrie wants to see CHICAGO!  She has  just fled a sleepy town which  suffocated her ambitions.  
Obviously we have a separation of little over a hundred years between these two Carrie's but their character's are of the same guild. The more things change the more they stay the same.
Now, I don't know if you remember when Sarah Jessica Parker started off as a poor orphan who later was  adopted by "Daddy Warbucks", then unfortunately she became a big nerd referred to as "String Bean"on a show entitled "Square Pegs", then she was a redneck in "Footloose", following that there were some less than noteworthy bit roles. Later, I saw her in a hilarious movie with Steve Martin (L.A. Stories) where they were dating.  The scene that stood out the most was when they took a romantic get away.  The first night in bed together Martin abruptly throws up the sheets and declares, "Good God, what are wrong with your breasts?" To which she replies, "Oh they're real".  That stepping stone lands her into the heart of Manhattan where she turns into the fashionista diva, Carrie Bradshaw!
*Sister Carrie, poor unrefined bumpkin, naive as a babe in the woods shows up in Chicago.  Her first job is in a shoe factory (Oh, the monotonous dreariness). She is a shabby hidden butterfly who covets all the glamor that surrounds here.  
*Then she hooks up with a sport called Drouet who is a sleek looking and  slick talking character that really does have a good heart but wandering nether regions.  He helps Carrie and sets here up in nice quarters and clothes.  (This is the beginning of the clothing obsession).  No Jimmy Choo shoes but pearl buttons, parasols, leather patten lace up boots, silks, bejeweled purses, hats...and so on.  She and Drouet live together but then it just doesn't work out.  Like Carrie Bradshaw she seems to have commitment issues.
*She than hooks up with an older esteemed gentleman, Hurstwood (Mr. Big) who sweeps her off her feet with his position, power and of course MONEY.
*One little problemo, he's already hitched to a Stepford nightmare wife and has two bratty self indulgent adult kids. 
*Hurstwood (after some moral deflation of the most unscrupulous variety) flees to New York with Carrie, and as his decline becomes inevitable her rise as an actress is a forgone conclusion.  
*Hurstwood withers to the point where he is unrecognizable.  He ventures into the dregs of society as Carrie becomes Manhattan's "IT" girl.
*And, of course there are new love interests and the ever present obsession with fifth avenue.


Now, this is a ridiculous review of this novel.  But, the social, sexual, Victorian caste system analysis can be read anywhere. But, if I really wanted to say something about this book, I would have titled it  "It Is But The Work Of A Moment".  It really is Hurstwood's story and he is by far the most compelling character.  Dreiser's narration style reminds me of Dickens.  And, I also kept thinking about the angel in "It's A Wonderful Life" giving us the characters little backgrounds and inner feelings as they would provide the proof.  Recommend*** Ahh, Yeah!

HALLOWEEN READ?

Well it's that spooky time of year, which always felt spookier in Maine vs. Hawaii.  My house in Maine was built in 1875 (old farm house) so it lent itself to being quite creepy naturally.  I'm wondering what book I should read off the list that would give me a lil' of that "chill up the back" feeling.  Thinking maybe "Deliverance".  Any suggestions???

Off that topic, somehow how I ended up as one of my own followers if that makes sense.  How do I get myself off there?  I'm a slight bit challenged.