Reading Post #6

This week I finished the book The Sirens of Titan, and it was actually a pretty good book. Like before there were many similarities between this book and Slaughterhouse-Five. Both books addressed the idea of a sealed fate and how everything is set in stone. One of my favorite quotes from this book was when a Trafalmadorian(close to Sluaghterhouse huh?) was on the planet Titan, but he is a robot, and he says, "His mind buzzes and pops like the mind of an Earthling-- fizzes and overheats with the thoughts of love, honor, dignity rights, accomplishments, integrity, independence--". I really like this quote alot because it talks about how this robot was programmed to do something but when asked to do something he was programmed not to do, he changed it and decided to do things for the better.

Finally, this book was another great example of a satirical based book that uses death and diminshes it to make it seem much more pointless. Kurt Vonnegut did a great job at writing this book and I would love to read another one of his books.

Reading Post #5

This week I have decided to read another Kurt Vonnegut novel, The Sirens of Titan. this book follows the story of a man named Malachi Constant. From Beginning to end the book seems Topsy Turvy the whole way. The book addresses many problems in society as well as creating some just for the story itself. When I read this book it did take me a while to read because at some points it did get very boring. But as a whole the book, shows us how absurd and completely proposterous human beings are when it comes to life. Also it shows what happens when someone knows all things that are going to happen and act as a god over other people.

I think that think book is quite similar to Mr. Vonnegut's other book, Slaughterhouse-Five in that it uses the idea of time travel, not completely in the Sirens of Titan, but it also has a much less linear story line compared to other books. Also just like his other books, Vonnegut uses a lot of satire to play down some ideas like death. Finally, another great similarity to Slaughterhouse is that the idea of the pointlessness of war plays another big role. Perhaps, since this was written before, Kurt Vonnegut tried to come up with some of his ideas for Slaughterhouse in some other of his books; many of the ideas in this book are used almost the same in Slaughterhouse.

Reading Post #4

This week I decided to start a another book called The drawing of the Three written by Stephen King. The story follows the life of a gunslinger named Roland. He must get to the dark tower to find out why he is alive in the world; but that is in the seventh book and this is only the second. Anyway, Roland finds out that in order to reach the dark Tower he must find the "Three Doors". The book creates a dual/parallel universe where inside the doors is the "door" to a persons mind, but the thing is that they are in, what it seems like, a whole different dimension as well as different points in time. This sense of altered reality strikes as almost being quite similar to Slaughterhouse-five and I wonder if Stephen King was perhaps inspired by Vonnegut's use of time travel.

Roland's personality is one that he sees other people as a tool so that he can get what he wants. He couldn't care less if a person lived or died just as long as they bring him forward in his journey to the Dark Tower. This book brings a sense of time travel, complete surrealism, as well as euphoric states into a book that helps keep things interesting but still leaving much to the imagination.

Reading Post #3

For this week I have decided to blog about Slaughterhouse-Five written by Kurt Vonnegut. This book explores many different kinds of realities and addresses all of the many types of war. While reading, I noticed that whenever somebody dies he uses the term "so it goes". From his perspective it is from the Trafalmadorians because they time time in one continuous stream. But what I think is actually happening is that he is using satire to play off the idea of death and making it not seem that bad. Like in All the King's Horses Billy Pilgrim almost becomes detached from death and thinks logically and without emotion.
The fact that he uses his life story for the first chapter and melds it into a story inside of a story, shows that many things that he says in this book he agrees with and advocates. Also his sense of skewed time shows how people remember things in many different ways but also shows how people can be thinking.

Also I think that Vonnegut added the dual title in order to almost bring in his sense of how he viewed that war, but then he could also have Billy's "title" of the book as well. Since the book is a mix of a war story with some autobiographical parts in it, Vonnegut was able to not just write another book but indirectly tell some things about his life and how they have affected him.