Cat’s Cradle

C

So apparently “Cat’s Cradle” is being made into a feature movie.   I haven’t re-read Vonnegut in a long time, but I’m looking forward to it for the same reason you look forward to anything related to any book you ever loved.  Because it brings the book back to you, and with it, the love you felt.  Only to lead to horrible disappointment, maybe.  But still.  If you can’t ever be disappointed, it means you no longer hope for anything, so to hell with that.

Reminded me of something else I wrote about here, my memory of a particular page in Vonnegut’s “Sirens of Titan.”  I wrote about how I described the page to my daughter, who was reading it at the time.  I told her it stuck in my memory forever, or at least for the last thirty years, which is almost forever for a forty-five-year-old.  I no longer have a copy of the book, but thanks to Google Books, I was able to find the page online.  It’s reproduced below.

Weird, but it still gives me chills.  And I think maybe that’s why I wanted to be a writer in the first place.

About the author

Tom Howard

Tom Howard is the author of Fierce Pretty Things (Indiana University Press, 2019).

He received his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Fierce Pretty Things won the 2018 Blue Light Books Fiction Prize, and his individual stories have won the Ninth Letter Literary Award in Fiction, the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Fiction, the Carve Magazine Prose & Poetry Contest, the Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, the Innovative Short Fiction Prize, the Willow Springs Ficiton Prize, the Rash Award in Fiction, and the Robert J. DeMott Award for Short Prose.

He lives with his wife in Arlington, Virginia.

1 Comment

Leave a Reply

By Tom Howard

More

Get in touch

Feel free to follow me to get a follow back, and to say hello.

Follow me on Twitter

%d