The Year Of Reading Kurt Vonnegut

I’ve been meaning to get around to this for a while, and just haven’t. Part of it is the fact that the press blitzed us with it last week, starting with NUVO; part of it is that I just haven’t had a chance to get into any of the books yet this year - I’m currently reading Boating For Beginners (Jeanette Winterson), Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway), and The Painted Veil (W. Somerset Maugham). And there are five other books from the library waiting in the wings - two memoirs (former HP CEO Carly Fiorina and former New Jersey governor James McGreevey), a book on the Rosslyn chapel, a book on Tarot, and a book on modern Greece.

As a somewhat related aside, when my buddy Steve was helping me move into my house last summer, he helped me carry into the house box after box of books - enough to fill the four six-foot and two three-foot bookcases in my office/study/writing room - and made this witty comment: “John, stop reading!”

So here it is, then - 2007 is The Year Of Reading Kurt Vonnegut here in Indianapolis. This is part of the One Book, One City program that Indianapolis got on board with a few years back - a program wherein people submit to the library their ideas for books that they would like to have everyone in the city read at roughly the same time. The library then whittles the list down to a number of finalists, and the winner is selected, if I recall correctly, by a panel of library folks, the mayor, and probably some others.

They have chosen to focus on Vonnegut this year, to honor the contributions to literature of perhaps Indiana’s best known writer. The article from NUVO, now a couple of weeks old, I’m sorry to say, can be found here, and the information on the library web site can be found here.

I’ll be interested to see which book is chosen to be the “one” book that everyone reads, once the final decision has been made. Slaughterhouse-Five is his best known and most popular book, and Cat’s Cradle is the one that put him on the map, back in the sixties. I half expect one of them to be chosen (probably the former), but would be impressed and surprised if the choice were something a bit less under the radar - such as Palm Sunday, a non-fiction book of essays, speeches, and other bits that he has written over the years, and one that sings something of a song about Indianapolis, where he was born and raised. Player Piano would also be a good selection - it’s his first novel, and it reads a lot like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, except that it’s also funny.