"He is the reason I believe in God"

Some Brief Brouhaha about Books

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

Very Brief Summary: Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. (from Amazon.com)


Whenever someone asks me to recommend a book, this is my go-to title. I have recommended Owen Meany to countless students, and just about everyone who ever reads loves it.

When I was studying abroad in Scotland, a couple of my flatmates, Claudia and Christoph from Austria, told me over and over that this book "is so special, and so funny." So when the semester ended and I headed out on my train trip across Europe, I decided that this would be my book. So I started reading it while riding on the trains in between cities, and I immediately fell in love with it. Irving's prose is wonderful, but his characterization of Owen Meany and the novel's narrator, John, are brilliant, and the little details of specific incidents, such as the Christmas pageant, make the story great. Frequently, I would find myself laughing out loud uncontrollably, while the other passengers (French, Italian, Swiss, etc.) just stared at my raucous rudeness. This is hands-down one of the funniest books I have ever read.

The story is beautiful, and the religious symbolism and mysticism add layers of depth and heartbreak. And Owen Meany is the most peculiar hero in literature. I was finishing the novel on my flight back across the Atlantic, trying to hide my sobs, but the flight attendant came over and asked me if I was ok.

A Prayer for Owen Meany is hilarious, strange, and heartbreaking, and it is a novel forever burned into my heart.

One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, "Poo-tee-weet?"

Some Brief Brouhaha about Books

Slaughterhouse-Five or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut

"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time."


Slaughterhouse-Five is one of my favorite books ever. It is at once hilarious, bizarre, poignant, and sad. The novel tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, who travels back and forth in time, from his present life as an optometrist to his past at the bombing of Dresden to his future on the planet Tralfamadore.

Billy learns much from his travels, especially from the Tralfamadorians, who teach him that time is not linear, and so everything that has happened and will happen is simply constantly happening. And Vonnegut structures the book to conform with the Tralfamadorian sense of time. So while novel jumps back and forth between time periods, everything – every passage and every image – in Slaughterhouse-Five connects with other images throughout the book. All of the scenes are “brief, urgent messages” – all the more so because of the urgency of the Vietnam War – and when taken as a whole, the novel shows the intense personal impact that war has on people who live though it. The Tralfamadorians explain that in a book, “There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep."

I read Slaughterhouse-Five for a class I took in Scotland called "Literature and War," and from the opening lines, I knew that I had stumbled upon something special. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book I can read over and over, and I gain new insight every time. I think that this novel truly shows the power of literature and of language.

And it has the best last line of any novel ever.



Previous Book Posts: A Prayer for Owen Meany

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"The dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.”

Kurt Vonnegut
1922 - 2007

So it goes.