Book review: “Breakfast of Champions” Kurt Vonnegut (1973)

Reviewer: Tanaka see all my reviews

I finished “Breakfast of Champions” by Vonnegut yesterday. I enjoyed it immensely. Reading a masterpiece of this quality got me thinking about how much time I’ve spent so far reading novels that were not really worth reading, and that I should be more picky about which novels to read from now on so I won’t waste my time anymore reading awfully boring ones out there, churned out by a bunch of cheesy potboilers whose world-views based upon their narrow-mindedness and bigotry make me feel sick. They are very easy to identify from their characteristic stilted prose style, that are made even worse by their blatantly materialistic view of the world behind it. Their views are by the way in stark contrast to what you will easily see lurking beyond Vonnegut’s apparently erratic, even sometimes lousy, prose style.

Reading quality novels makes your life seem worth living, whereas reading tedious ones like I mentioned earlier makes your life seem not worth living and even makes you feel suicidal. Even if I quit reading novels altogether right now, I’ll inevitably stumble upon quite a few fictions on a day-to-day basis, in the form of TV dramas, movies, cartoons, manga, anime, videogames, whatever. This seems to suggest that how happily we can live our lives hinges in part on how often we will come across quality fictions or, for that matter, how well we can avoid winding up with the dull ones; after all, most of us often wind up reading, listening, or watching fictions against our will in our everyday life, in one way or the other, as when your older family member or your weirdo brother insists that you all watch a prime time samurai drama at the living room on Sunday night, or when we are bombarded with totally unfounded media concoction, especially in the disguise of authentic science or health columns, written by media people backed by profit-seeking publishers who know no better than us about those fields.

Having said that, all of this is none of my business, because I’ve never played RPGs nor do I watch anime or samurai dramas and most of my spare time is spent doing somersaults, or at least reading nonfictions, rather than reading fictions.

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