O.I.C.

It dawned on me the other day that I had only reviewed one other Kurt Vonnegut book and my readers probably didn't understand why I was so amazed by the author. Well I did read another one that I forgot to put up here due to my fascination with Jimmer. I did read Breakfast of Champions in between Ask the Dust by John Fante and Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut.

Breakfast of Champions was a great book and I really liked it but I wouldn't encourage everyone to read it. It was just enough outside the realm of main stream that I am positive that not everyone would like it like I did. The story is about a writer, Kilgore Trout, who shows up in a lot of Vonnegut's books and Dewayne Hoover who owns a car lot in Midland City just off the freeway. Trout is coming to this small town to accept a writing award at a convention that he has been invited to. Dewayne is deranged and believes that everything Kilgore writes is the literal truth. Kilgore is also a little off but in the end you find him relatively sane.

I thought that this book was really good. A friend let me borrow it and I read it in a few nights. I really like the way that Vonnegut writes and his interesting take on mundane things of the world.

Quotes:

• Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
• I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
• Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.
• Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
• Why are so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissue? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
• We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
• Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.