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Cat's Cradle
Cat's Cradle is engrossing from the first chapter to the final page. The chapters are short (most are less than two pages in length) which allows the reader to fly through the book, even if it's read in short bits.The fictional story revolves around folklore and personal accounts of those who knew the late creator of the atomic bomb. A sobering topic, but Vonnegut manages to create situations with refreshing humor, satire and imagination.
Cat's Cradle
You'll need some suspension of disbelief with Vonnegut, as usual, but he's a wonderful writer and his social criticism (especially of organized religion, in this case) is usually spot on. Thoroughly entertaining if a little strange.
Cat's Cradle
Either this guy is an immaculate genius, or he labours his prose to the bone; it is so ridiculously simple to read, but what a read! You're easily halfway through before the realisation seeps in that this is a HELL of a ride you're going on, you have no clue what'll happen next, but look back and all you see is perfect necessity. You're in a maelstrom of whirling bits of dazzling colour, apparently unrelated, and before your very eyes they start to fit together in ways unimaginable and faster than you can grasp. The beauty and the terror just keep building up until your eyes start to tear with the unbearableness of it all. God, how it all fits together! The laughter strangled in my throat again and again because it was beyond funny. You can't even call it tragic any more. There are no words in the English language with enough of their original intensity left to describe what Vonnegut achieves with this book, at least for me. He does it perfectly, inimitably. Your vision is stretched so severely, your heart so laden with emotions with no name, you find yourself mute. Which is frustrating, because the first thing you want to do is evangelise about your newfound belief in humanity and great things like that, to deaf people eagerly armed with sharp, sharp pins.
Cat's Cradle
Being an avid Vonnegut head, I hold this as one of my personal favorites. I either recommend this or Slaugterhouse 5 for friends who want to explore Vonnegut's writings
Cat's Cradle
The novel is great, but the terrible formatting of the RosettaBooks edition makes it almost unreadable. Quotation marks are misplaced with the wrong sentences, spacing is incorrect, and so on. I e-mailed them about the problems but got no reply.
Cat's Cradle
This book isn't for everyone, that's for sure. The central theme is a fictional religion based around the principal that everything is a lie. The first line makes that clear. Characters include a midget, an introverted modelmaker who forced bugs to fight one another in his younger years, a man who is forced to make bicycles for blind people in Afghanistan, an insane elevator operator, a maniacal dictator, a sex symbol from a fictional island, the man who helped invent the atomic bomb (and has an odd fascination with turtles), a particularly destructive nihilist, and a doctor named "Breed", believed to have an affair. Some of the most memorable scenes involve all possible meanings of the term "Mayonnaise", fun with indexing, and a twenty-foot phallus used as a gravestone. Oh, and there are 127 chapters, each of them a page long on average.If all that just strikes you as weird, then Vonnegut really isn't the guy for you. The fact that this is normal in comparison to my favorite Vonnegut book, Breakfast of Champions, should say a lot about him. After all, this guy has one of the strangest senses of humor in literary history. His work really is inaccessible.I think he's great, though. He's got the same absurdist sense of humor as I do, and he's a social critic to rival the best of them. Especially here, where he mocks both science and religion, two very different fields. It's a hilarious book, but there's more to it than just the humor. There's also the underlying social and political implications, which is really what makes it fly.This isn't a good book in the traditional, "descriptive setting, fleshed-out characters" sense. I don't think it was meant to be. Instead, it's a wild, fast-paced ride, which moves from one biting indictment of society (he takes on everything from patriotism to nihilism). It's hilarious, it's enlightening, it's distinctive... it's pure Vonnegut.