God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
by Kurt Vonnegut
Read November 2007
Copies: RCPL-WBL (first half), Mine (second half)
Essay written March 15th, 2008
I bought an ugly old copy of this book some years ago at a library book sale, fully intending to read it some day. I don't remember if I was even a Kurt Vonnegut fan yet at that time. But there it was, and there it sat on my bookshelf for years. I just couldn't bring myself to read a book with such an ungodly ugly cover though. So I kept putting it off.
Last fall I was at the White Bear Lake brance of the Ramsey County Public Library, in the last row of the alphabet (Steinbeck through Z), and came across the Vonnegut. I've read most of the books they have there at the library, which is to say about a third of all of the Vonnegut books there are. And they had a brand new shiny copy of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
Moral dilemma. Do I read this brand new shiny copy of this book, with its slick V-motif design? Or read the dilapidated unloveable copy at home on my shelf? I can't remember my reasoning, but I opted for the former. Stupid waste of a quarter at the library book sale, but it was worth that wasted quarter to read a nice copy of the book rather than the ugly one. Right?
It's still a dilemma, but that's how it played out in my mind at the time. I checked out the library's copy, took it to Iowa with my when we went there for Thanksgiving, and forgot it at my parents' house when we came home again. So I was halfway through it, and the moral dilemma sort of solved itself for me. When I got home, I located my ugly copy of it and finished the novel from that one. Then when my parents came to visit us a few weeks later my mom brought me that library book back. (In the meantime I had renewed it online and thus avoided the late fees, not to mention the cost of shipping a book from Iowa to Minnesota.)
Thus endeth the adventures of moral dilemma wrestling in the upper middle west.
Good book, but then, very few of Kurt Vonnegut's books aren't. Hocus Pocus was pretty awful. So was Slapstick, by Vonnegut standards, which is odd because it was the first Vonnegut book I read and you would think it would have turned me off of the rest of his stuff.
An interesting thing about Vonnegut is that, for myself anyway, my favorite Vonnegut novel is almost always the one I've most recently finished reading. Until recently, when I observed that. Now I guess I like them all equally with the aforementioned exceptions.
This is the first Vonnegut book I've read since he died in April 2007. He is missed. The world is a much less interesting place without Kurt Vonnegut in it.
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