Kurt Vonnegut RIP

When I was a younger reader, I was a completist. I didn't have knowledge of dozens of books and writers at my fingertips, so when I found a book I really liked, I would read everything by that author. And so it was that I read substantially everything that Vonnegut had written before I left home for college, starting with a late novel, Hocus Pocus, after finding it lying around the house when I was 14 or 15, and finishing up with Player Piano, Vonnegut's first novel, on a long, late-summer car ride home from Maine, a few weeks before moving away from home. So, in many ways, Vonnegut was in the background through my teenage years, providing a vivid counterpoint to the mundanities of suburban high school life. His books are very important to who I am as a reader and a writer, so I'm sad to see him go.

Some links: My call for more people to read the lesser-known Vonnegut novels. The New York Times obit.

Update: Some of you may be seeing a lot of folks writing "so it goes" today in response to Vonnegut's death. For those who are curious as to why, the phrase comes from what is perhaps his most famous book, Slaughterhouse-Five, where he wrote: "When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'"

Also, I found Vonnegut's official site to be particularly poignant today.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:06 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

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