Just wondering... I read Slaughterhouse Five a while back, recently read Sirens of Titan, and am now reading Cat's Cradle. To me, these have all been page-turners keeping me up into the wee hours of the morning even when I've got to wake up early the next day, but at the same time a lot is lost on me... I'd like to hear what someone else got out of his books, or any great books for that matter...

...and while we're on the subject of reading, anyone got any good suggestions for books or authors?

Surely, someone else here reads...

In college I read Cats Cradle for an assignment and it turned out to be one of my favorite books of all time. I read Slaughterhouse Five last year, and although it was good, it wasn't as aw inspiring as Cats Cradle.

His work isn't for everyone though. I kept boasting out it to my wife, so she gave it a whirl but didn't make it past the first few pages. She ended up saying it was too "out there."

As in the sci-fi part of it? I find it kind of funny/entertaining... I think it often sounds like the ridiculous but extremely creative fantasy of a nerdy 12-year-old, but if you see beyond the surface (which I can barely do), it's part of his genius. Which, yeah, I guess some people wouldn't dig. Some people love Jane Austen... she puts me to sleep...

I thought Slaughterhouse Five was okay. I think I read it this summer or spring. Not all that compelling, but enough that I finished the book fairly quickly. It definitely wasn't what I was expecting in terms of a WWII book, but I was intruiged by the way Vonnegut slipped between the parallel "universes" of the main character, so to speak.

I'm pretty sure I read Cat's Cradle at some point in school but I don't remember it.

Mother Night by Vonnegut is great. Not sci-fi at all. It's about an American spy in Germany during WWII who is on trial for war crimes after the war. He cannot prove that he was a spy and was not actually a Nazi.

If you like scifi, then Philip K. Dick would be a good start. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is also good.

Other authors and personal favorites:

Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum
James Ellroy - The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, White Jazz (together known as the LA Quartet)
Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club, Stranger than Fiction (a collection of non-fiction articles)
William Gibson - Neuromancer (this is where the Wachowski brothers got a lot of their ideas for The Matrix), Virtual Light, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country
Richard Preston - The Hot Zone (this is the scariest book I have ever read... because it is a TRUE, NON-FICTION account of an Ebola outbreak in Virginia)


But as Reading Rainbow says, "You don't have to take my word for it." Check a few out for yourself.

vonD

Try Larry McMurty, Lonesome Dove is awesome and some of his work revolving around modern life is poignant as well. For pulp fiction try Ken Follett. Especially Pillars of the Earth. Can't go wrong with the old stand bys of Raymond Chandler and D Hammett. I re-read them all every few years or so, it's always entertaining.

Vonnegut... Isn't he that dude in "Back to School" with Rodney Dangerfield?