Review of Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

I read Slaughterhouse Five last year and loved it.  I think Vonnegut’s a genius, and I was super excited about this one.  But somehow it never came together for me.  Although I feel like I missed a lot, which I’m going to blame squarely on myself rather than the author.  I would love to study Vonnegut in a literature class so  I feel like I’m getting more out of his books (although I suspect Vonnegut would laugh at me for that).

Here’s the basic plot, as well as I can describe it: narrator John is researching the father of the atomic bomb right after World War II, Felix Hoenikker (who is fictional but based on actual scientists).  His fate becomes intertwined with that of Hoenikker’s children, Newton, Frank, and Angela, when he travels to San Lorenzo, a fictional small island in the Caribbean.  Frank, who disappeared from home years ago, is now the assistant to the dictator of San Lorenzo, who threatens to impale anyone who misbehaves on a giant hook.

Oh, and one more thing: Dr. Hoenikker’s three children are carrying around their father’s greatest invention, ice-nine, which increases the freezing point of water and could turn the entire planet into ice.

If you’re a Vonnegut fan, the oddness of this story won’t surprise you.  You also won’t be surprised that this book is really about the conflicts between science and religion.  Dr. Hoenikker lives an unhappy life even though his bomb won the war and made him a hero.  His children hate science and what their father represents.  The title of the book refers to a Cat’s Cradle that Dr. Hoenikker makes with string for his young son Newton on the day the bomb was dropped.  Newton sees his father as scary and spends his life wondering how some criss-crossed string can be described as a cat or a cradle, when clearly it looks like neither.

Here’s how it starts:

When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called The Day the World Ended.

The book was to be factual.

The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

It was to be a Christian book.  I was a Christian then.

I am a Bokononist now.

I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon.

No one points out the ridiculous quite like Vonnegut.  He also makes up (and makes fun of) an entire religion, Bokonon.  John finds a book in San Lorenzo that describes Bokononism, which says that everything, including the religion itself, is a lie, we are bound together by fate, and the greatest intimacy is achieved by two people touching the soles of their feet together.  John tells us this about a woman who thinks she has God all figured out: “She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing [writes Bokonon].”

The book was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1964, and of course, its ideas about nuclear weapons and biological destruction would have been very relevant at the time.  Although as I think about it, those views are just as relevant today.

I have to admire Vonnegut’s amazing creativity and satire, and yet this book wore thin pretty quickly.  I can’t really explain why – I know I haven’t been on my best reading game lately.  If you’re a Vonnegut fan, what did you think of this one?

This book counts towards my Classics Club and To Be Read Pile Challenges.

The Classics Club Book Spin

The Classics Club is doing something called a “Classics Spin”.  What is that?  First, I have to take my Classics Club list of 50 books and pick 20 I haven’t read.  I post the list, and on Monday the Classics Club will pick a number from 1-20, and that’s a book I have to read by April.

I’m also supposed to include some books on my list that are challenging or that I’m kind of nervous about reading.  I am going to “cheat” a little since I’ve piled on a lot of challenges this year, and include books that are also on my TBR Pile Challenge.

This seems like a good way to choose my next book, so here’s my list. Some short (Lois Lowry, Edgar Allen Poe), some long (George Eliot), some intimidating (Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner). I even random-ordered it.

1. Maugham, Somerset – Of Human Bondage
2. Kipling, Rudyard – Kim
3. James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
4. Jackson, Shirley – The Haunting of Hill House
5. Heinlein, Robert – Stranger in a Strange Land
6. Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
7. Murakami, Haruki – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
8. Ishiguro, Kazuo – The Remains of the Day
9. Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
10. Poe, Edgar Allen – The Raven
11. McKinley, Robin — The Hero and the Crown
12. Lowry, Lois — Number the Stars
13. Eliot, George – Daniel Deronda
14. Kerouac, Jack – On the Road
15. Fitzgerald, F. Scott – Tender is the Night
16. Austen, Jane – Mansfield Park
17. Spark, Muriel – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
18. Faulkner, William – Light in August
19. Greene, Graham – The End of the Affair
20. Vonnegut, Kurt – Cat’s Cradle

Of course I could choose my own book, but I’m a rule-follower at heart so I’ll do what I’m told.  Stay tuned to see what gets picked!

North and South: the Read-a-long Wrap-up

Well, I’m clearly no good at read-alongs, because I failed to post the last two weeks and honestly, I enjoyed the book so much I finished it well ahead of schedule.  So there you are.  Reading on a schedule doesn’t work for me.

That aside, this was a wonderful book, and I’m grateful to the read-along hosts for that nudge to pick it back up.

If I have a favorite time and place in literature, it’s Victorian England.  For one thing, it seems like a time that female authors really broke out and wrote successful, genre-changing literature.  Although since George Eliot wrote as a man, I can’t say the field was wide open for women writers at the time, but at least we can benefit from their work today.   Maybe I also just like the language of the time, and the way conventional society life just seems ready to break apart into something completely different.

North and South is similar in a lot of ways to the writing of Austen and Eliot, but different too (and how’s that for an insightful analysis?).  One thing you see in all three is the impact of financial worries on women at the time, women who are smart enough to run their households but who have little say in the decisions that impact them the most.  These three writers also like to contrast the intelligent woman (who you assume is really the writer) with the more frivolous, superficial women around them.  The men are criticized too, but not in the cutting way that the women are.  I wonder if Austen, Eliot and Gaskell felt themselves very set apart from other women in their time.

I posted a summary of North and South in this post, so I won’t repeat it here.  What really sets this book apart from its contemporaries is its unique subject matter, the exploration of conditions in northern industrial England compared to southern rural England.  Main character Margaret Hale begins the story with the idea that southern England (the sleepy town of Hellstone) is the place where all things are good, beautiful, and natural.  London is bustling and stylish but the big city isn’t for her.  Then she has to move to the industrial city of Milton.

Milton is dirty, loud and smoky.  It’s also a place where the classes walk side by side in the streets.   There’s a tension between the classes that doesn’t exist in Hellstone or London, because the factory workers know that the owners depend on them, which has given rise to the unions (or maybe vice versa).  Even with the unions, working conditions for the laborers are horrible.

Milton is an awakening for Margaret, who thought she knew what life was all about.  Her easy life in the country meant she could ignore the poverty around her.  In Milton she comes face to face with it.   Like many of Austen’s main characters, Margaret is “genteel poor” – meaning she’s of the upper class and can afford a house and a few servants.  She’s not suffering by any stretch but she’s looked down upon by the rest of her class, and one disaster could send her family off the edge.

Nothing is simple in Gaskell’s story.  Religion, labor, class, family, even things like duty and honesty – everything is multi-dimensional and seen from different viewpoints.  You could talk about this book for hours.

The side characters of Bessy, her father, and Mrs. Thornton bring this book to life, but Mr. Thornton was my favorite.  He’s proud, stubborn, smart, thoughtful, well-meaning but too rigid in his views.  For example, he will go out of his way to do something kind for a person he knows, but has no concern for the larger issues of the laborers until it impacts him economically.  Gaskell describes him as basically selfish but loyal.

Margaret, on the other hand, is a little more insightful about the big picture issues.  She knows nothing about labor or management but sees instinctively where Thornton is going wrong.  On the other hand, where Thornton is all about strength and direction, Margaret seems to float along and does whatever people ask her to do.  She’s no Elizabeth Bennett, and her inability to speak her mind or take action is extremely frustrating.   Not that she has it easy – Gaskell does everything she can in this story to tear Margaret to shreds.

I really enjoyed watching how Margaret and Thornton change throughout this book – it isn’t just that they come to understand each other, but they really grow as people.

For anyone who likes Austen, Eliot, or Dickens I would highly recommend this book.  Gaskell’s writing is a little more down to earth (although difficult to follow at times) and her characters are a lot more nuanced.  You get a love story here, and a good one – but you get a lot more than that.

I Join the Classics Club: 50 Classics in 5 Years

Jillian over at A Room of One’s Own has created the Classics Club, where you sign up to read 50 classics over five years.  Since I love a good book list, I thought it was worth trying to create a list of 50 classics I want to read.

I came up with this list by looking at a few “literature you must read” lists, and then looking at some of the lists of other Classics Club members, and then of course my own TBR/Challenge list.  I tried to mix up genres a little bit, though I can’t say I went too far out on a limb.  At first I thought I’d have to name a lot of re-reads to get to 50, but that wasn’t the case at all.

My list can be boiled down to: 1) books I really want to read; 2) authors I haven’t read but feel I should (like Faulkner, James, Kipling); 3) classic children’s books (Newbery winners); 4) classic science fiction; and 5) a few re-reads (like Catcher in the Rye).

For the record, I’m not going to push myself to read 50 classics in five years.  I had fun just making the list (which tells you a lot about the dorkiness level here), and it helped me generate lots of ideas about books I want to read.  Plus a lot of these are children’s books.  Ten classics a year if you include children’s books — not impossible.

Any of your favorites on this list?  Where do you think I should start?  Is there anything on this list you tried and couldn’t get through?  Do you think anything on this list (like Haruki Murakami) is too current to be considered classic?  When does a book become a classic anyway?

1. Allende, Isabel – The House of Spirits (reread)
2. Austen, Jane – Mansfield Park
3. Babbit, Natalie – Tuck Everlasting
4. Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre (reread)
5. Buck, Pearl S. – The Good Earth
6. Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
7. Collins, Wilkie – The Moonstone
8. Cooper, Susan — Over  Sea, Under Stone
9. De Cervantes, Miguel — Don Quixote
10. Dickens, Charles – Bleak House or Oliver Twist
11. Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
12. Eliot, George – Daniel Deronda
13. Faulkner, William – Light in August
14. Fitzgerald, F. Scott – Tender is the Night
15. Gaskell, Elizabeth – North and South or Wives and Daughters
16. Greene, Graham – The End of the Affair
17. Hardy, Thomas – Far From the Madding Crowd
18. Heinlein, Robert – Stranger in a Strange Land
19. Hugo, Victor – Les Miserables
20. Ishiguro, Kazuo – The Remains of the Day
21. Jackson, Shirley – The Haunting of Hill House
22. James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
23. Kelly, Eric – The Trumpeter of Krakow
24. Kerouac, Jack – On the Road
25. Kipling, Rudyard – Kim
26. Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird (reread)
27. Leroux, Gaston — The Phantom of the Opera
28. Lowry, Lois — Number the Stars
29. Maugham, Somerset – Of Human Bondage
30. McKinley, Robin — The Hero and the Crown
31. Miller, Walter – A Canticle for Liebowitz
32. Morrison, Toni – Song of Solomon
33. Murakami, Haruki – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
34. O’Brien, Tim – The Things They Carried
35. Paterson, Katherine — Bridge to Terabithia
36. Poe, Edgar Allen – The Raven
37. Salinger, JD – The Catcher in the Rye (reread)
38. Smith, Betty – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
39. Spark, Muriel – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
40. Stegner, Wallace – Angle of Repose
41. Steinbeck, John – East of Eden
42. Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
43. Verne, Jules – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
44. Vonnegut, Kurt – Cat’s Cradle
45. Walker, Alice – The Color Purple (reread)
46. Wells, HG – The Invisible Man
47. Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
48. Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
49. Wilde, Oscar – The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
50. Woolf, Virginia – Mrs. Dalloway