I have finished Moby Dick and have thoroughly enjoyed it, though Melville’s sentences are too long and strung together with odd punctuations. I’ll share my “Three Things to Love” about it soon. Now, to bed!

Thanks in part to the reading challenge in Jacqui’s Room, this has been a summer of books. The list of works I’m pursuing for that quest has been blogged about before – thus far I’ve managed Don Quixote, The Great Gatsby, and Slaugherhouse-Five. Still reading (and enjoying) Moby Dick – like Cervantes, it’s enjoyable (to me, anyway); it’s just taking a long time.

In the meantime, I have countless other book waiting for me. I loaned a colleague my copy of a favorite, Carter Beats the Devil, and was immediately loaned The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, with The Mulligan thrown in for good measure – a novel by a Minnesota dentist about a Minnesota dentist who leaves his “good life” and heads West (or so I gather). I also have battered copies of Leaves of Grass (which may replace Blood Meridan in my reading challenge list) and selected tales from The Arabian Nights, plus Elmer Keith’s Hell, I Was There and The Tao Te Ching waiting for me.

At work, it’s two of my boss’s favorite books, E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered and the Lincoln biography Team of Rivals. Plus, we went to a great day-long seminar by Yale professor emeritus Edward Tufte and received four of his beautiful books – then a friend bought me a copy of Tufte’s mom’s book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. And this doesn’t scratch the surface of speech writing, leadership, higher education, and public policy books growling from the shelves.

Downstairs? Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu is calling. Perhaps this winter …

Alright, here goes – a quick review. I should really read this one again, I think.

Three Things To Love about Slaughterhouse-Five:

1. The Man: Our hero, such as he is, is not heroic. He’s an average, even funny-looking, man who is no one’s idea of a soldier. He has problems headed into the war, and perhaps more coming out. Indeed, none of the characters in this book are larger than life. And some are considerably smaller.
2. The Message: Three words – So it goes. I’ve said that for years, without ever knowing where it came from. Certainly if this book didn’t coin the phrase, it elevated it to a new level. From the natural passing of the family dog, to the deaths of fleas and lice as the POWs are decontaminated, to the leveling of Dresden, everyone is dying, all the time. Sometimes we hurry it along. Sometimes we don’t remember. Sometimes we don’t even notice. So it goes.
3. The Method: Here’s another audaciously told story. The timeline’s a jumble, but instead of creating clever devices to signal shifts in time, Vonnegut simply tells you. Hell, he tells you how the story begins and how it ends before he introduces the main character. He repeats “so it goes” to the point of ridiculousness (which, I guess, is the point). He almost dares you not to read his story. I couldn’t put it down.

Given the numbers of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and breaking down, it’s interesting that this book is by a WWII vet and paints a similarly bleak picture of life after devastation. Some deal with it better than others. I’m not sure where Billy Pilgrim falls.