Wait, what?

Breakfast of Champions  - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Dell, 1973)

Last night, the Stanford Prison Experiment came up in conversation, which led me to the Milgram experiment, the Third Wave, and the blue eyed/brown eyed exercise.  These all dated to the 1960s and early 1970s, which led me to wonder what exactly was going on in the air those days.

(I mean, I sort of know the answer, but seriously...)

Which leads me to Vonnegut. It's been a long time since I've read him, and I guess maybe I had forgotten how eccentric his writing could be.

The novel is the lead up to a momentous meeting between a crazy old science fiction writer and a prosperous businessman that ends with the businessman going postal and eventually (after the action of the novel) the author achieving acclaim and winning a Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Oh, and a huge supporting cast. Including Vonnegut himself, in town to watch his creations on their collision course.

The important part: every character matters and has a real story. No minor character should be treated as minor. In fact, "so many Americans [were] treated by their government as though their lives were disposable [...] because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales." None of this for Vonnegut. Which makes for a whole lot of story. And also illustrations, and commentary, and a matter-of-fact telling of some of the less attractive parts of American culture and history, the way someone in hundreds of years might explain it to a child, or to an alien visitor.

Seems a reasonable way to ring out 2013, I suppose.

Post 500! (also, manipulating children)

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card (Starscape, 1977, 2002)

So, Card's a little controversial. But if I knocked every author off the list for having views I find abhorrent (ahem, Tolstoy) I'd have a reading list of approximately zero. What really interested me in this book is how many of my male friends have told me this was the book that made them like reading. (Awww!) And yet, without the movie coming out, I might never have gotten around to reading it.

In brief, Ender is a genius. He's been monitored for much of his young life to see if he is The One who will help them win the ongoing war against alien creatures called Buggers. (Ugh, that name.) So he's chosen and gets sent to Battle School with a bunch of other similar kids, and there's training and strategy and armies and creepy psychological games, etc. These are interspersed with conversations between Colonel Graff, Ender's champion, and various other military figures. Oh, and along the way we digress for a whole crazy side plot involving Ender's two siblings (also geniuses) and their attempts to shape world policy by becoming (what would now be known as) Internet intellectual personalities.

And the games get harder and the psychological toll more brutal, with each step more trying than the last. It was hard to read, especially as you keep remembering that Ender is a child - his classmates too. He is six at the start of the book, and twelve (if I remember right) at the end of the main action. Genius or not, it's too much.

That said, it's delightful reading Ender's analyses and strategies. He's definitely clever and unorthodox. It's much easier to stay in the games themselves than to journey outside them, to the hard stuff. And then the end of the book, post-climax, goes off in all sorts of crazy directions. (In my opinion, the film handled this much better.)

To conclude, I'm glad I read this, and I understand why it meant so much to so many young readers, but it was a challenging book in many of the wrong ways. I need something that makes me despair a little less.