"Slapstick" by Kurt Vonnegut

[El Dingo]

So I have a bunch of sex books from a Tower incident. It's funny - buy me a drink and I'll tel you.

Anyway, when we moved we sold a bunch of books at garage sales. The sex books might have been over-the-top for the family houses we used for selling so we kept them back.

We took them to a local used-bookstore (Black Oak Books) and got $65 in credit (they were good picture-books).

I got a signed Alan Moore 'Tom Strong' hardback and Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slapstick', which I had read years ago but hadn't seen since.

I read it in one sitting.

Kurt Vonnegut has been one of my favorite authors since the movie 'Slaughterhouse 5' mad me want to read the book.

'Slapstick' is about deformed twins that achieve genius when they (literally) put their heads together. Their wealthy parents confine them to an isolated mansion and they grow up perceiving the world in a purely intellectual state.

A brilliant book and I finished it (again) in 2 days.

My idea of God is someone like Kurt Vonnegut. Pure objectionaist view of humanity and its follies.

Now I'm craving more Kurt. Must re-read 'Breakfast of Champions' and 'Mother Night'

El Dingo

[King Bob]

I also love Vonnegut's work. Slapstick was one of the entertaining but (to me) slighter ones. But as with all his books, there were some great bits in there. For me, the greatest ones are (no particular order) Sirens of Titan, Galapagos and Bluebeard. I really like Sirens of Titan because I love old pulp SF, and I love what he does with the genre. (I love Philip K. Dick and AE Van Vogt for the same reason.)

The recent short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box had a couple of nice pieces in it, but some was not that good, understandable since it was previously uncollected stuff. Some of that stuff was uncollected for a reason.