Swimming The Good River

Finished 8/3/2017
I think this was my 3rd reading

Finished 8/15/17
Another I think it was my third reading.

Started 8/15/17, finished 8/21/17
Again, third reading.

Finushed 8/26, started Cat's Cradle

Player Piano 1952

The Sirens of Titan 1959
Mother Night 1961 Adapted as a film in 1996
Canary in a Cathouse September 1961

The Very First Christmas Morning 1962
Cat's Cradle 1963

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine 1965
Welcome to the Monkey House 1968
Fortitude 1968
Happy Birthday, Wanda June 1970. Adapted as a film in 1971

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death 1969 Adapted as a film in 1972

Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday 1973 Adapted as a film in 1999

Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons 1974
Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! 1976 Adapted as a film in 1984

Jailbird 1979
Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage 1981

Deadeye Dick 1982
Nothing Is Lost Save Honor: Two Essays 1984

Galápagos 1985

Bluebeard, the Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916–1988)  1987
Requiem 1987 With music by Edgar David Grana

Hocus Pocus 1990
Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage 1991
Make Up Your Mind 1993
Miss Temptation 1993 Adapted by David Cooperman

Timequake 1997

Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction 1999

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian 1999

A Man Without a Country 2005

Armageddon in Retrospect and Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace 2008

Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction 2009

While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction  2011

Kurt Vonnegut: The Cornell Sun Years 1941–1943 2012

We Are What We Pretend to Be: The First and Last Works  2012

Sucker's Portfolio: A Collection of Previously Unpublished Writing  2013

If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young 2013

Life, Meaning of

"I don't know what's going on . . . and I'm probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we're being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it's over."

Boaz

to himself

The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut

I'm moving slow like Uncle Joe on my Vonnegut Chronological-ish Oeuvre Trek, but I've got a lot of distractions, literary and otherwise. But I am most assuredly enjoying the hell out of The Sirens of Titan. I don't know if I properly appreciated just how good this book is the first couple of times I had my way with it. For one thing, the distance between this Vonnegut and the Player Piano Vonnegut is just imfuckingmense. I'm going to have to go back at some point and see what happened to him between 1952 and 1959. My guess would be that he wrote a shitload of short stories and started honing his style, because in The Sirens of Titan he is full-blown Vonnegut. 

He also introduced quite a few set pieces in this novel . . . like the Tralfamadorians, Wanda June, Stony Stevenson, Kazak, & the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Maybe some other stuff that I have overlooked or haven't gotten to yet (about a hundred pages left to go). And it's FUNny. I'll never forget my dad reading this book (I gave him a copy of it and Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons) and laughing really hard when Vonnegut talked about the exACT thickness of the iron field on Mars. Good times.

Man, I miss my dad.

Man, I miss Kurt Vonnegut.

Jacqueline & Burl Ives

There are many reasons why I love my daughter Jacqueline. One of them is that she loves Burl Ives . . . and sings "Silver & Gold" with him several times a week . . . and another is that she would be really excited to see The Burl Ives Song Book for sale at Half-Price Books. 

Jacqueline Says

Jacqueline and I were eating dinner and she told me, "Don't turn the tv on to Judge Judy!" Well, of course I had to say that not only was I GOing to turn the tv on to Judge Judy, but that for Christmas I was going to give her a dvd set of The Best of Judge Judy. Jacqueline responded, "You better not!" and I replied, "You're not the boss of me." She responded in a fierce whisper: