The Year Of Reading Kurt Vonnegut (#2)

Hey, it only took me about six weeks of 2007 to knock out my first book in the Year of Reading Kurt Vonnegut that’s going on at the library.

The first book I chose to read was Hocus Pocus, a novel I had read once before but had not particularly enjoyed that first time. It’s about a college professor who chronicles his life on random scraps of paper while awaiting trial for supposedly masterminding a prison break. Like most Vonnegut novels, it is difficult to sum up in a sentence or two. The main character/narrator, however, among his other eccentricities, does not use profanity (substituting phrases that retain the spirit of the swear without the actual swear itself) and writes numerals when the word he would have written would have been a number.

Examples:

• “The shit hit the fan” in standard vernacular would become “The excrement hit the air conditioning” in this novel.

• I might ask you to name the ten best movies you have ever seen. The narrator of Hocus Pocus, however, would ask you to name the 10 best movies you had ever seen.

Like I said, I did not care much for the novel the first time, but I enjoyed it very much this second time - a phenomenon echoed by Stephen King in Hearts In Atlantis, when Ted Brautigan says to Bobby Garfield that “good books don’t give up all their secrets at once,” after Bobby asks Ted many questions about Lord Of The Flies after having read the book only one time.

I happen to think it’s true, too. There are way too many books out there for any one person to read, but there are some - actually quite a lot, I think - that are meant to be read more than once. And there are a few, the ones we like the most by the writers who are the most important to us, that are meant to be read over and over and over again.

So that’s what I know today. Next up on the Vonnegut reading list is probably Galápagos, unless I find something more interesting at the library this afternoon. (I watched Factory Girl after work last night and need to find out a bit more about Edie Sedgwick, and re-read the book Greil Marcus wrote all about one particular Bob Dylan song, before I write about it. This will require a trip to the library downtown - which will likely result in a scanning of which Vonnegut books are currently available for checkout.)

UPDATE: For those interested, the "One Book" program, which encourages citizens of a particular community to read and talk about one particular book each year, is a nationwide thing. Click here to check out the web site.