Galapagos

When I was in high school, my class was given a reading assignment where we could select a book of our choice from a list of about 10 or so. I didn't know anything about any of them, and picked at random Kurt Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse 5. I was blown away by the novel and it grew to be one of my favorites- I remember discussing different theories I had about it with my classmates. At the time, I wasn't much of a reader, but I did pick up a few more of Vonnegut's books- Timequake and Welcome to the Monkey House, a collection of short stories of which I got about halfway through. While neither was up to the level of quality of Slaughterhouse 5, I enjoyed them.

Moving forward to this summer, I've had a good amount of spare time, and so in additiong to my backlogging of games, I decided one of my other tasks would be read the rest of Vonnegut's works. First came Bluebeard, which may be my new favorite of his; then Breakfast of Champions- also very good, but it was built up a little bit too much. And now I've just finished Galapagos, Vonnegut's look at evolution.

One of my favorite things about Vonnegut is his blunt but hilarious tone. Early in the book, he tells you what characters will die, and just to make sure you remember, he puts an asterisk in front of their names for the rest of the book as a reminder. Thus there's almost no tension, and most of the plot points are revealed well before they actually happen. As with all Vonnegut books, Galapagos is sci-fi, but the sci-fi elements don't come into play too much here. The majority of the story is about 10 or so characters who end up forming a crew of people getting stranded on one of the Galapagos islands. After most of the events in the book occur, it's revealed that the entirety of human civilization has since died off, and our small group of survivors become the ancestors to all mankind after that- the narrator tells the whole story from one million years in the future as though it's the most important event in the course of human history.

Vonnegut, while never really laugh-out-loud funny, delivered a story that kept me smiling, and while it started to drag around the end of book 1, was mostly up to snuff with his more well-known novels. It may not be his best, but it's still Vonnegut, after all.