Will I love The Sirens of Titan?

It doesn’t get better than Vonnegut. And I think the books you don’t read in school—like this one, Galapago, or Breakfast of Champions—might be his best.

Behind every joke, every outlandish piece of worldbuilding, there’s a hidden meaning. Here, he masterfully dissects free will and the inherently silly idea of purpose, balancing tragedy and wit through a wildly convoluted plot and a ridiculous cast of characters.

It’s stayed with me for years.

The closest person to me in the world, before she died, gave me a copy of this book, several years ago. I eyed the copy in my house, waiting until I felt ready to read it. I had only read Vonnegut once before, nearly forty years ago.

This book surprised me with its linguistic lightness of touch and beautiful playfulness. There is a cumulative power in the storytelling, crescendoes of pyrotechnic virtuosity, and an underlying solemnity and fatality in dealing with mortality or the occasional weird transcendence of it in time and space.

I kept experiencing the book as a… show more.

While we all know Kurt Vonnegut as a brilliant satirist, his humor very often is covering something incredibly dark that is lurking just under the surface. I find Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan can make me go from laughing at the absurdity of a situation to tears at the outcome, all of this in a matter of a few sentences. 

His writing is so tight and clean, but his storytelling is richly layered. While I’ve read this book several dozen times, I still find something new upon every re-read. It’s like it has something new to show me on each reading. 

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