Book Review: Cat's Cradle

After my wedding over a month ago, I found myself with lots of newly freed time to read. I quickly blasted through The Ask and then decided to rock another Kurt Vonnegut book, Cat's Cradle. Admittedly, I flew through both books and didn't really commit to taking notes. I was just happy to read for pleasure again.

Vonnegut has a very interesting writing style. It's mildly humorous, but totally weird. It's dark, but for some reason comes off lighthearted. He has an interesting way of being satirical without being too obnoxious.

This story was narrated by the main character, John (or Jonah), who was collecting material for his book, which explored what people were doing the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The fictional co-creator of the bomb, Felix Hoenikker, was making a cat's cradle to show his children. The children are the main characters that John interacts with and it's a very strange and surreal novel.

A funny side note was that my husband was recently playing the game Portal 2 and it sort of reminded me of this book. The point of Portal 2 is testing for science and of course there's a big ole human-killing apocalypse and science proves to be the demise of humanity. I thought it was interesting that dudes like Vonnegut were already exploring that kind of sentiment back in 1963.

Bottom line: It was good, but it really served as a jump start for my reading more so than the social commentary that it was intended for when it was published in 1963. I still respected it for that purpose, though.