So, yesterday Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died. In a 2003 interview he said, "One kid said he had the key to all my books and he put it in a sentence. He said, 'Love may fail but courtesy will prevail.' Love does fail all the time, you know, and it makes people vicious."
He was the author who got me interested in reading. I used to go to the library a lot after class in high school. I would pick a random book, and start reading it. If I liked it, I'd check it out. I read a couple of chick-lit books, (it was Bridget Jones heyday, shut up) but I got bored with that really quickly. That was when I learned that just because I like one book, I won't necessarily like the whole genre. So anyway, I would just walk down the fiction aisles waiting for something to pop out at me. One day I walked past the Vonnegut section, and I picked up Cat's Cradle. I stood in front of the bookshelf and read the first few chapters. I finished that in a few days, and then I read Galapagos, then Breakfast of Champions, then Slapstick, and Welcome to the Monkey House, and Slaughterhouse-Five, and Hocus Pocus.
About four years later, my dad loaned me his copy of Bluebeard. I still haven't given it back. It's my all-time favorite. I don't really know why, maybe I just think one-eyed Armenian painters are awesome. Anyway, somewhere along the way I had switched from the library to the bookstore. So I began to build my collection of (legitimately purchased) Vonnegut books.
When talking about his decision to stop writing novels, he said, "I felt as I did when the Second World War ended: Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do, can't I go home now?".
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