Books Worth Reading: Cat's Cradle

I get little time for reading fiction and I assume that is pretty much true of everyone else. Cat's Cradle is short moving like a hopped up Ford at full tilt. It has a special significance as being the first book I read of Kurt Vonnegut's. I decided to write this up when I read Cartoon apocalypse in The Guardian. I cannot disagree with The Guardian's comments of the book such as this:

No self-respecting realist would ever contrive to unite on the terrace of the presidential palace of San Lorenzo such a collection of representatively deformed people as Vonnegut gathers there: the three warped children of the inventor of ice-nine; the expiring dictator of San Lorenzo, "Papa" Monzano; a bluff American capitalist from Indiana and his hideously chipper wife; two decent and ineffectual American diplomats ("I was fired for pessimism. Communism has nothing to do with it"); the teenage sex goddess Mona Monzano; the hardboiled humanitarian Julian Castle and his son; a former Auschwitz physician doing unlikely penance at the Castle's clinic in the jungle ("If he keeps going at his present rate, working day and night, the number of people he's saved will equal the number of people he let die - in the year 3010"); and of course the boozy, glum, and nicotine-stained narrator himself, a journalist doing research for a book on Hiroshima called "The Day the World Ended".

But it is a dangerous book. Once read it can lead to people not taking our leader's pomposity quite so seriously. It will also lead to reading more Vonnegut and the more Vonnegut read, the better for all of us to learn to laugh at the end of the world