Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Well, I was about to write another one of my extremely popular political posts when I found out that Kurt Vonnegut had died. It made a gray day even grayer. Vonnegut may be the best of that batch of postmodern writers who tended toward the playful side in that he could continue to write after that moment had faded and that the books he wrote then and after don't seem nearly so dated as, say, John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy. The first book I ever read of his was Cat's Cradle, and then it was on to the two defining books, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. Honestly, I don't know if they're defining, but they're the two I would put on a list of his most famous work, much like you'd have to list The Great Gatsby for Fitzgerald or The Sun Also Rises for Hemingway. Or My Antonia for Cather, even though The Professor's House is much better.

There's something deliciously childish about a fifty year old man writing a book laced with crudely drawn scatological cartoons.