Kurt Vonnegut 1923-2007
I have a confession to make. I’ve never read Slaughterhouse 5. Yes, I know, beat me with a wet noodle. It wasn’t on my required reading list for high school English, although that didn’t always curtail my reading selections, in high school I was more into biographies, historicals, and the beginning of my life-long love affair with the romance.
I have a confession to make. I’ve never read Slaughterhouse 5. Yes, I know, beat me with a wet noodle. It wasn’t on my required reading list for high school English, although that didn’t always curtail my reading selections, in high school I was more into biographies, historicals, and the beginning of my life-long love affair with the romance.Once out of school my reading grew more inclusive of romances with sporadic jaunts into the worlds of Koontz, King, and Saul. With a limited budget for reading materials I was very selective of where my book dollar went. Hence, the overabundance of romances. They were guaranteed keepers for my bookshelves.
As the literary greats are passing away I’m coming to the realization of what I’ve missed by limiting myself and not finishing college. Luckily, reading is something we can do until the day we die. Even with failing eyesight, readers have large print and cassette recorders for books for the Blind.
Each day is a new chance to discover the classics or rediscover them if you were lucky enough to find them during your early years. Delve into them and find out why they are classics. Why they will be read for decades after the passing of their authors.
Gotta run, tracking down Slaughterhouse 5.
What classic do you most remember? What classic do you wish you had read?
As the literary greats are passing away I’m coming to the realization of what I’ve missed by limiting myself and not finishing college. Luckily, reading is something we can do until the day we die. Even with failing eyesight, readers have large print and cassette recorders for books for the Blind.
Each day is a new chance to discover the classics or rediscover them if you were lucky enough to find them during your early years. Delve into them and find out why they are classics. Why they will be read for decades after the passing of their authors.
Gotta run, tracking down Slaughterhouse 5.
What classic do you most remember? What classic do you wish you had read?
4 comments:
Everything Constant did he did in style — aggressively, loudly, childishly, wastefully — making himself and mankind look bad.
Constant bristled with courage — but it was anything but un-neurotic. Every courageous thing he had ever done had been motivated by spitefulness and by goads from childhood that made fear seem puny indeed.
—"The Sirens of Titan,Kurt Vonnegut
No one writes like this anymore. Agents turn it away, claiming its to wordy. And it is really work, to pull so much from within and put it on paper.
I never read Kurt Vonnegut, but my mother would put such books in front of us as, Tom Sawyer, White Fang, Jane Austin books, and the Bronte sisters, then came The Robe, War and Peace, and yes even Gone with the Wind. She always said, she wanted us to read classics before romance and other dime store novels as she called them. I'm glad she did. Those were my first books, before I read any romance novels. And in many ways, it made me a snob when it comes to my reading even today. Nothing compares to the emotional and descriptive flare of those authors.
I have never read Slaughterhouse 5, but I have read the Bronte Sisters, Tom Sawyer and to Kill a Mocking Bird. Lately I have stayed close to what I love, Romance. Even Chick Lit has been a disappointment. I want a guaranteed happy ending. Even though you think it might not end that way as you follow the story, it does and that makes things okay. I also love the Little House books by Laura Wilder, and love that my daughter has started to ream them.
Lyn
Many are the great books that I missed, and Slaughterhouse Five was one. I was and still am a huge Shakespeare fan, read Dickens, the Brontes, Mary Wollenstonecroft Shelley, Dostoyevsky, Poe, Tolstoy, etc. Then I concentrated on the medieval and Renaissance worlds, and pretty much ignored the moderns. Often, I will read an excerpt like the one Lee quoted, and I will realize anew that there is a library full of great writing that is still out there (thank God!) and I will go and find such a book and will be gifted with a true revelation.
But I don't agree that editors all reject fine writing. I think the restrictions of genre fiction and the agents'/editors' standards of acceptance of manuscripts in those genres can blind us to the fact that good literary fiction is being written every day, and it is being published. However, the same "rule" applies to these submissions as to those in our genre -- not everything is equally good in quality, and the truly outstanding is still rare indeed. A Kurt Vonnegut doesn't come along very often, so when he or his kind leave us, the loss is all the greater. All we can do is honor him and those of his kind by trying to make our own writing as good as it can be.
I came to a realization as I read your notes. I have read many classics. Many more than I remember off the top of my head. With Vonnegut I was just thinking, "Wow, I've never even read his work and now he is gone." My next trip to B&N will be to support a writer while they are alive to enjoy the fruits of their labors.
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