I hadn't read Vonnegut in awhile and I was breezing through the Philip K. Dick bibliography. I am kind of in a situation where my reading habits depend entirely on the public library, for several (mostly financial) reasons. So, the Dick selections are dwindling and I decided to bridge some Vonnegut gaps and maybe later revisit some favorites. The Sirens of Titan was a good place to jump in, as it certainly shares a lot with books like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It's the starting place for Vonnegut's humorous take on fate. As usual, there's plenty of laughs and great imagery. In some ways, I suppose, it's more typically "sci-fi" than later works, as it's set in the future, there's spaceships, other planets are involved, etc. Not that he didn't often employ sci-fi themes, but Earth life is only a small part of the story. My only beef was that I thought the ending was a little anti-climatic and not in a over-the-top hilarious Vonnegut kind of way. But he had many great books ahead of him. ( )

I hadn't read Vonnegut in awhile and I was breezing through the Philip K. Dick bibliography. I am kind of in a situation where my reading habits depend entirely on the public library, for several (mostly financial) reasons. So, the Dick selections are dwindling and I decided to bridge some Vonnegut gaps and maybe later revisit some favorites. The Sirens of Titan was a good place to jump in, as it certainly shares a lot with books like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It's the starting place for Vonnegut's humorous take on fate. As usual, there's plenty of laughs and great imagery. In some ways, I suppose, it's more typically "sci-fi" than later works, as it's set in the future, there's spaceships, other planets are involved, etc. Not that he didn't often employ sci-fi themes, but Earth life is only a small part of the story. My only beef was that I thought the ending was a little anti-climatic and not in a over-the-top hilarious Vonnegut kind of way. But he had many great books ahead of him. ( )

DNF @ 1hr 40mins
I couldnt get into it and didnt like any of the characters.

A wonderful work of fiction that really makes you think about the value of your possessions, your views on militaristic societies, and has some of the wildest plot twists ever. ( )

"Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky." is the first line of the novel. The book itself is rich in ideas about free will (It turns out that humans don't really have it, having been evolved by Interstellar travellers to produce a small replacement part for a star ship, that is carrying a greeting card message to another interstellar group. Our hero, after discovering this truth, is droppedoff on earth, and freezes to death in Indianapolis while trying to get to his grandparents' home. A large number of other ideas get dealt out as teasers, setting up a large number of Vonnegut fans for future novels. It is both tender and funny. ( )