Cat's Cradle

I have my own personal Vonnegut story. When I was in high school, for most of those four years I spent lunch period alone in the library (the school had a very nice library indeed). It was easier than any of the other options. One year, while there, I read Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Every book he had published. I hated each one. I would finish a book, think to myself, “Thank God that's over,” return it to the shelf, and take the next one in line. I hated every one. I read every one.

I do not remember having read Cat's Cradle, but I know I did. I know I hated it.

HOW could I have hated this book? It makes no sense to me at all that I could ever have hated it. Cat's Cradle was written just for me. Strange and bizarre without being gratuitously perverse, it walks the fine line between comedy (I didn't laugh one time yet I would still call it hilarious) and satire and surrealism and science fiction. Don't tell me that line is a geometric impossibility; the book walks it anyway.

Also, if I weren't committed to being a Christian, I would become a Bokononist. Maybe I already am one and just don't quite know it.