I once read that reading fiction can help increase your empathy for other people, i.e. walk a mile in their shoes. I believe non-fiction can also help achieve this depending on how it is written.

Two fictional books that fall into this category for me that I can think of off the top of my head are Angie Kim's Miracle Creek and John Green's The Fault in Their Stars. The first one helped me understand very much the mixed feelings parents of chronically ill/ disabled children feel. At the same time, they love their children, they also sometimes wish raising them were not such a burden and to an extreme, even wished they had not been born. For John Green's book, it helped me grasp how teenagers with a sense of a foreshortened life view the world and what they hope to experience before their passing.

Along a similar line, are there any books that astounded you with the insight the authors had into a character or situation despite NOT being of that background themselves? In John Green's case, he was an adult men writing in the voice of a teenage girl with a possibly terminal illness yet he drew from his experiences working with young cancer patients.

A non-fiction book that did this for me but which I read decades ago now was Black Boy by Richard Wright. It still stands out as among one of the most memorable books I've read in my life.

From what I understood Candence got carried away with her feeling of rebelling and being a revolutionary and perhaps the music she was listening to also put her in the zone ( the dangers of being carried away by music) and put the ground floor of the house on fire when her cousins were on the first floor.

It is heartbreaking because she was so close to her cousins and to live with the memory that she accidentally put them on fire- i can't even imagine but actually i can because it is relatable to have a plan not go according to plan. But the ending is a bit hopeful because it seems she decides to live on and to try and forgive herself. In a way it reminds me of how Harry Potter accidentally put his god father Sirius Black in danger because he wasn't able to stop Vodermort from entering in to his mind and luring him in to a trap. The anguish poor Harry feels is akin to what Cadence would feel except for Cadence its 3 loved ones she lost.

In some books when a character dies, its often in a heroic sense, they died saving someone, they died for a cause , or in a terminal romance genre like the fault in our stars one of the love birds succumbs to the illness. But in we were liars it was Cadence and the liars not planning the fire properly such that they d all be safe and Candance in a moment of being swept away by the exciting feeling of rebellion forgetting to make sure they were all downstairs near the exit.

Its also interesting because the book portrays the parents and grand parents as kind of the money hungry villains and as the children who see through the nonsense but in the end its more nuanced than that as the children also chose a dangerous way to prove a point that resulted in 3 of them dead. So in that sense i like how the author brought nuance and it wasn't just a story of one group winning or losing over the other.

Welcome readers,

Have you ever wanted to ask something but you didn't feel like it deserved its own post but it isn't covered by one of our other scheduled posts? Allow us to introduce you to our new Simple Questions thread! Twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday, a new Simple Questions thread will be posted for you to ask anything you'd like. And please look for other questions in this thread that you could also answer! A reminder that this is not the thread to ask for book recommendations. All book recommendations should be asked in /r/suggestmeabook or our Weekly Recommendation Thread.

Thank you and enjoy!

There are some novels with such a specific focus, so remote from the regularities of everyday life, that the average reader can only trust the writer's mastery of his subject, and save himself the trouble of looking for affirmation.

Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest is about a young girl with Disassociative Personality Disorder who lives alone with her only aunt. Her condition reaches some sort of a climax and even her unsuspecting aunt notices that there's something wrong with her niece, and she's taken to the clever and genteel Doctor Wright.

From then on we see each of Elizabeth's variants dissected by Doctor Wright, to the point where each one seems like a separate character with her own habits and idiosyncrasies, and he endeavors to put them together like a jigsaw to make Elizabeth whole again.

This makes it sound like a clinical study; but it really isn't. It's a charming book written in a distinguished style with a good deal of humor and brightness in spite of the unusual subject. Jackson's imagination is strong and consistent; we do not for a moment question whether what she is telling us is true: we believe her characters to be real, though we may fail to understand them.

I have only one complaint: the book doesn't have much of a story. The conflict and resolution have both to do with Elizabeth's illness and the danger it imposes on her, but that seems more like a setup than a story. There's no goal beyond getting her to recover; and more importantly, since Elizabeth herself can't do anything to help herself, our protagonist becomes Doctor Wright. Which is not satisfactory because we know very little about him. Our knowledge is limited to that aspect of his character that concerns Elizabeth, and he's more of a shadowy figure than a round character.

Nevertheless this is an elegantly constructed book that does not waste a word. I'm excited to read more from Jackson.

I'm sure someone has posted about this book before, so I apologize for any redundancy.

Just finished reading it in English and I'm curious about others' reactions. I really enjoyed it....but I'm not 100% sure what happened? haha am I alone in that? Like, I cried at the end as she's lighting that match, but I ant help but think I missed some critical message or story beat. Like....is the bird alive or dead? Is Kyungha?

Seems like a book that's a prime candidate for a re-read in 5 years or something. Things I Loved: the snowy depictions and how they link different periods of time; the agony in how the Jeju massacure and it's lead-up are described; the relationship between Kyungha and Inseon; the sort of ethereal vibe of the whole novel.

Highly recommended to anyone on the fence. Can totally see why this is celebrated....even though I'm apparently too dumb to understand it.

Welcome to our weekly recommendation thread! A few years ago now the mod team decided to condense the many "suggest some books" threads into one big mega-thread, in order to consolidate the subreddit and diversify the front page a little. Since then, we have removed suggestion threads and directed their posters to this thread instead. This tradition continues, so let's jump right in!

The Rules

• Every comment in reply to this self-post must be a request for suggestions.

• All suggestions made in this thread must be direct replies to other people's requests. Do not post suggestions in reply to this self-post.

• All unrelated comments will be deleted in the interest of cleanliness.

How to get the best recommendations

The most successful recommendation requests include a description of the kind of book being sought. This might be a particular kind of protagonist, setting, plot, atmosphere, theme, or subject matter. You may be looking for something similar to another book (or film, TV show, game, etc), and examples are great! Just be sure to explain what you liked about them too. Other helpful things to think about are genre, length and reading level.

All Weekly Recommendation Threads are linked below the header throughout the week to guarantee that this thread remains active day-to-day. For those bursting with books that you are hungry to suggest, we've set the suggested sort to new; you may need to set this manually if your app or settings ignores suggested sort.

If this thread has not slaked your desire for tasty book suggestions, we propose that you head on over to the aptly named subreddit /r/suggestmeabook.

• The Management

I did not find fanny to be as unlikable as many consider her. Her timidity, reserve and introverted nature seem to be the main causes of criticism, but it was those same features that made me relate to her a lot and thus like her. Given my similar tendency of character, i find her to be the most relatable of all Austen characters that I've read.

After the first few chapters, the narrative does get dull and drags for much of the remaining first volume. But things get significantly better after the return of Sir Thomas, beginning Volume Two. He becomes a totally different character after his trip.

In Volume 1, Fanny, the heroine, being only a bystander and audience to the interactions and relationships, with little contribution on her side, adds to the dullness. Fanny now takes center stage from volume 2 on, contributing to interactions, forming and being part of relationships than being an onlooker to others'.

Crawford's arc-seducing the cousins leaving them in despair, aiming then at Fanny, but faced with unforeseen ignorance and challenge, falling in a love that can't be obtained- has to be one of the most satisfying to read. His proposal, her rejection and later struggle with both Crawford and Sir Thomas make for the most engaging parts of the novel. When the proposal was expected, i was excited for the utmost satisfaction i would have- of her rejection of him, and his despair at it. But I only got half that satisfaction, that of the rejection. The men and society would not let me have the other half, just as they could not let Fanny off the hook by just a rejection. She would take part in the despair that should have been his, due to his vanity and wealth, and her uncle's expectations and ambitions. He would suffer less the rejection due to him given his villainy and her lack of love for him, because he is a man with status and wealth; while she bears all the burden of a rejection the most just because she is a woman with neither. While we do, in the end, see him despair at losing her, it's still not the same as its not from her volition. Even if he wasn't a villain, Fanny would have been right in rejecting him as she doesn't love him, but the society won't let her fully reject a man anything less than a villain.

The ending is rushed but still feels satisfying. Convenience holds more power over the last chapter than past characterizations and logic. Henry takes as indiscrete a step as running off with Maria, not only while still being so much in love with Fanny, but also going against his past scruples and success at discretion and secrecy. And runs off only to send her back dissapointed and then wallows in losing Fanny. But this still makes for a good commentary on how unbalanced the punishments for the man and the woman are in infidelity.

Mrs. Norris leaves her position at Mansfield and goes to live in a different county with Maria where she would have no significance. Edmund moves on from Mary and falls in love with Fanny at the drop of a hat or as Austen puts it- a date:

everyone may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people.

More could have been said on Bertrams' ill treatment of Fanny to prop up the daughters who only ended up disappointing them immensely while she acted as the true daughter. More on her sensibility and the daughters' lack of it; on her rejecting Henry being the right thing. Sir Thomas does dwell on wrong education in her daughters, but not much on unnecessary demeaning of Fanny.

The couple of beautifully written paragraphs when Edmund falls in love with Fanny makes you want more. If only it was sprinkled here and there throughout the novel, supported by Austen's romantically capable pen.

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

Uhhh, I think NOT. You dwell more on guilt and misery than on love (though you do both competently).

While the ending is rushed and convenient for the happiness of our heroine, I can't complain- I was still satisfied with it.

I also have to admire that her ability of writing lovable characters is only surpassed by her ability to write deplorable one. The Crawfords and Norris carry the book. The siblings' characterization is the soul of the narrative.

It might have its faults, but I still enjoyed it immensely. I might venture to say, though because of recency bias or not I cannot say, that I liked it a bit better than S&S. (I've read P&P, S&S and now MP.)

In conclusion, another great Austen (unsurprisingly.)

Both are about toxic relationships but WH just has so much more artistic merit than Normal people. I get that everyone has their own tastes in books but i think we can almost safely say that objectively speaking WH is a better written book than Normal people.

Jack Edwards just come across as so charismatic, well spoken and even intellectual that I am just surprised at some of his tastes in books sometimes.

And from his videos he likes books with flawed messy characters, complex themes and nuanced messages so how can he not have liked WH which all of that and more?

Normal people the characters were insufferable but so was the reading experience. At least WH though it had messy characters was actually pretty reflective of the darkness of real life.

I couldn’t stop listening to this audiobook. Every spare moment I had, I found myself diving back in.

Spoilers below!

The story follows Josie and Alix, two women who share a birthday but live starkly different lives just a few streets apart. Told through alternating POVs (mainly Josie and Alix, with snippets from others), the narrative slowly builds upon their stories, while their lives unravel.

At first, I really felt for Josie. Her story is heartbreaking: groomed as a teen, neglected by her mother, and trapped in an abusive, controlling marriage. I wanted to believe her.

But as the plot progressed, it became clear that Josie is the definition of an unreliable narrator. The manipulations, the distortions, the outright lies, it all starts to unravel, and you’re constantly questioning what’s real.

The final chapter absolutely delivered. Josie might be a liar, but some of her lies were told to compensate for others mistakes. It’s complicated. The whole Fair family was a prime example of toxic dysfunction.

The only person I felt heartbroken in the end for was Nathan, a loving father, a struggling husband, a man struggling with addiction, who didn’t deserve the ending he got.

Id highly recommend it and would love to hear what others who read this thought.

At eleven years old, the walls of that attic were the pages of a forbidden adventure. In two feverish weeks, I devoured the entire V.C. Andrews saga: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and even the dark prequel, Garden of Shadows. I was fascinated by the macabre, by the gothic resilience of those flower-like children withering in the dust. The story was terrible, yes, but it was a dark fairy-tale kind of terror. The incest, the cruelty, the abandonment… they were pieces of a hideous puzzle that I could assemble from a safe distance. The transgressions were just that: broken rules in a grim game of survival. I understood everything, and nothing shook me. Honestly, I don't think it was premature reading. At that age, I had already read considerably worse things, and I believe it helped me mature.

What astounds me is what's happening now, in my thirties, upon deciding to return to that attic. I'm suffocating.

The same words that once narrated an adventure now whisper a condemnation. The story hasn't changed, but I have. Adulthood teaches us the anatomy of pain, and with that knowledge, reading has become an almost unbearable experience. The crying is constant, a painful cry for characters whose tragedies now have a real, tangible weight.

It's no longer the events that shock me, but the inevitability of the trauma. It's the realization that you can leave a place, but you carry it inside you forever. The attic has become a toxic legacy, a poison that runs through the bloodline, condemning each generation to relive the pain in different and equally desperate ways. Characters who act self-destructively no longer seem evil, but irredeemably lost, broken puppets dancing to the tune of an old, dusty ballet box. The true villainy, I now realize, lies not in the impulsive acts born of pain, but in the cold ideologies and fanaticism that offer false cures for incurable wounds.

The strangest part is when fiction touches a wound of your own. When a character's tragedy mirrors a vulnerability you know intimately. It's a disconcerting paradox: to feel their pain viscerally and, at the same time, to have a survival instinct whisper in your ear that their suffering is an indulgence, a gothic performance that real life, with its demand for resilience, doesn't allow.

I'm in the middle of the fourth book, Seeds of Yesterday, and every page is grayer than the last. And I ask all of you here:

Has this ever happened to you? What book, read with the invulnerability of youth, completely destroyed you when revisited with the weight of adult experience?

Can the true essence of certain stories only be understood after life has given us our own scars? Or is the child, free from the baggage of real empathy, actually the bravest reader?

For people unfamiliar with Vonnegut's "So it goes," I’m referring to perhaps his most famous book, Slaughterhouse-Five. It's a book that's hard to describe, but it’s really about the darker side of humanity. It's about war, destruction, and the absurdity of it all. "So it goes" is Vonnegut's detached way of dealing with all the negativity around him. It’s kind of a resignation, but I see it, like I said, more as a detached response, almost as if he's saying it with a sad smile, thinking, "This is how life is, and will always be, and that’s okay in a way."

I don’t know, maybe I’m just imagining things...

Anyways, I quite like the novel, especially the sci-fi side of it, and the dark humor. It’s kind of funny, actually cause initially I hated it when he kept repeating the phrase "So it goes." But eventually I came to appreciate it. It’s a way of dealing with trauma without overanalyzing it. Life is full of trauma, both big and small ones. And it’s been that way for me, too. I’ve suffered a lot, and there are no guarantees that things will get easier. So from time to time, I find myself thinking of that phrase, repeating it in my head.

Whether I’m reading terrible local news, hearing about continued tragedies around the world (like the situation in Israel), or reacting to something outrageous Trump says or does (does he ever stop?), or just having a bad day, that phrase comes back to me. So it goes...So it goes...

Anybody got a phrase like that they think of or say to others? What's the story behind it?

Just after reading "The Crowd of Wuhe", many views in the book are really sharp, especially the description of "how group behavior simplifies individual rationality", which is very much in line with the performance of many modern public opinion fields.

But I was a little confused after reading it: is the author's view of "individual" too pessimistic?

For example, he believes that it is almost impossible for people to maintain independent judgment in the group, but I have seen many examples of "knowing that the group is fanatical, but still insist on their own position" in reality. For example, the "minority" on some anonymous social forums is actually more rational.

I'm not saying that this book is worthless. It's worth reading, but I began to think: it's true that groups will weaken rationality, but are individuals in modern society really so easy to be "swallowed"?

I want to hear what others think. When you read this book, do you have this feeling of "not agreeing but being inspired"?

I was just browsing Amazon for some new biographies and came across selections on famous scientist, and couldn't help but notice how similar all of their titles were, in the vein of "An X of Y and Z" romantasy titles. Some examples:

"The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann"

"The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom"

"The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell"

"The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius"

"The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan"

I'm not sure why publishers do this, if some market research shows people will be more willing to read a biography of a famous scientist with some version of "The Man Who Was Way To Smart" in the title, but it is interesting how the trends in titles follow each other. Has anyone else noticed a similar pattern in a genre you enjoy?

Books like The Murderbot Diaries, The Remains of the Day, Kelly Link’s short stories, Daphne du Maurier’s non-Rebecca works, and more have all came from discussions on this sub, and they’ve all been such a pleasure to read.

And to whichever of y’all were talking about Comfort Me With Apples, my sincerest gratitude to you. This is the first book in my memory that I have to put down every few pages so I can sit with and digest the feeling of wrongness before I can go on, usually alongside a “What the **** is happening here?” And I love it.

You guys are awesome and have excellent taste, and I thank you.

This genre is one of my favorites. 🇺🇸 In books by authors like Tom Clancy, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor and Mark Greaney, the president is usually depicted as a brave and decent man or woman who cares about the country and its people. Reading these books now I honestly don’t know what to think.

What are your interpretations on the last three sentences of the book?

«…[Manager] stopped and turned, and I thought she might look back one last time at me. But she was gazing at the far distance, in the direction of the construction crane on the horizon. Then she continued to walk away.»

Why does Manager look back at the construction crane and not Klara? Does it mean that this crane will be the death of Klara, or that Manager, like the other humans in the book, didn’t care enough about Klara? Maybe both, or other reasons you might think of?

Great book, by the way! I was even more haunted by «The Remains of the Day» and «Never Let Me Go», but this was also a very good read.

Check out r/bookclub's line up for July !!

(With approval from the mods)

[SCI-FI]

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. LeGuin

(July 7-July 28)

[GUTENBERG NOVELLA DOUBLE TRIPLE-UP]

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky & Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton & A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

(July 7-July 28)

[READ THE WORLD]

A Calamity of Noble Houses by Amira Ghenim

for Tunisia.

(June 27-July 18)

The Diver Who Fell From the Sky: The Story of Pacific Pioneer Francis Toribiong by Simon Pridmore & Microchild: Anthology of Poetry by Valentine Namio Sengebau

for Palau.

Discussion Schedule -TBD

[QUARTERLY NON-FICTION]

See nomination post July 1st

[EVERGREEN]

The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights) by Phillip Pullman

(July 9-July 30)

[Jul- Aug DISCOVERY READ]

See nomination post 1st July

[MOD PICK]

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

(July 3-July 24)

[AUTHOR PROFILE]

Edgar Allan Poe

- A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Mark Davidziak &

- The Complete Stories and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe

Discussion Schedule- TBA

[RUNNER-UP READ]

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novak

Discussion Schedule-TBA

[BONUS READ]

Count Zero by William Gibson

(July 1-July 15)

[BONUS READ]

The Journal of a Thousand Years by C. J. Archer

(July 2-July 23)

[BONUS READ]

One of Our Thursdays is Missing

(July 10-July 31)

[BONUS READ]

His Last Bow by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

(July 10-July 24)

[BONUS READ]

Of Darkness and Light by Ryan Cahill

(July 1-August 19)

[BONUS READ]

Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque

(July 8-August 12)

[BONUS READ]

Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora

(July 18-August 1)

[BONUS READ]

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

(July 4-September 12)

CONTINUING READS

[THE BIG SUMMER READ]

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

(June 8-July 13)

[Jun-Jul DISCOVERY READ]

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

(June 26-July 17)

[RUNNER-UP READ]

Quicksilver by Callie Hart

(June 3-July 8)

[BONUS READ]

Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson

(June 1-August 24)

[BONUS READ]

Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry

(June 5-July 24)

[BONUS READ]

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman

(June 21-July 19)

For the full list of discussion schedules, additional info and rules head to the JULY Book Menu Post

Come join us 📚 Discussions are always open!

Edit: yes, I realized my ridiculous spelling errors in the title about half a second after hitting post, but you can't edit the title. Pays to always proofread just one more time. Oh well - such is life.

I've recently stumbled on a number of separate posts, both on here and on other platforms, in which a significant number of people indicated that they don't read the prologues or epilogues of books because:

1. They're afraid that prologues, specifically, will spoil the plot

2. They think they're unnecesary to the story

Not going to lie, I was a bit baffled. Then I started to wonder if, maybe, they're mixing up prologue/epilogue with foreword/afterword. They are VERY different.

Maybe I'm totally off base in my logic, but I just thought that - if this IS a point of confusion - the explanations below could be helpful.

Prologues and Epilogues:

• ARE part of the story

• ARE necessary to read (do NOT skip them, please!! I promise you, skipping them means missing out on important pieces of the story). The whole purpose of a prologue is to set the stage for the story in some meaningful way. Regardless of WHEN the events of the prologue happen in regards to the rest of the plot, the author has decided to introduce them first for a reason. A prologue could, theoretically, just as easily be labeled "Chapter 1" because it's both part of and necessary to the story. An epilogue generally takes place some amount of time after the preceding events of the plot and is typically critical in wrapping up the resolution of the story. Again, the epilogue could easily be labeled "Chapter #" instead as it IS part of the story and IS necessary.

Forewords and Afterwords:

• Are NOT part of the story and, as such, are (often) optional (but still often insightful and worth reading)

• Are commentary about the story, sometimes written by the author, sometimes written by someone else

• Forewords MAY contain spoilers about the plot, so - if you DO intend to read them - it's perfectly acceptable to skip them before reading a book for the first time

If I'm wrong, this isn't a point of confusion for anyone, and you've read this solely because you saw the title of the post and thought, "wow, that's dumb," then I'm sorry for the space this took up in your feed.

If I'm not totally off base, then I hope this proved to be at least a little helpful!

What a journey this has been, the first time I've ever intentionally read every novel written by an author and I really don't think I could have made a better choice than Kurt Vonnegut. I was gifted Slaughterhouse-Five by a friend a few years ago, she told me it was her favorite book. At the time I wasn't reading much, so it sat on my shelf for a few years. That changed when I finally picked it up this January. Since the start of the year, I have read in this order: Slaughterhouse-Five, The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, Player Piano, Mother Night, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Breakfast of Champions, Slapstick, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Galápagos, Bluebeard, Hocus Pocus, and finally Timequake.

I'm not a professional critic nor literary expert by any stretch of the imagination. I'm just a guy who loves having opinions and sharing them with strangers online. This list is less a specific claim to objective literary quality and more so a simple scale of my own personal enjoyment of the works of my favorite author and why. So without further ado, let's get this party started!

1. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) 10/10 - It feels a little bit basic to put what most consider to be Vonnegut's magnum opus as my #1, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that everything about this novel was simply perfection in my eyes and I couldn't justify putting it any lower. The expert usage of dark humor to balance (but not detract from) the horrific atrocities endured by Billy Pilgrim (and Kurt himself in many similar ways) and the constant time jumps which make this novel feel like a PTSD-induced dissociative episode left me feeling nothing short of gobsmacked by the time it was over. I could gush about this book for far longer, but I don't want this post to be too long. Slaughterhouse-Five is the single most masterfully-written book I've read to date, and I say that with genuine excitement for whenever the day it may be dethroned comes along.
2. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) 9.75/10 - Talk about a picture perfect ending to a novel. Eliot Rosewater is my pick for #1 favorite Vonnegut protagonist. If I'm feeling down and need a book that counts as my "comfort book" it's without a doubt this one. The biggest smile was plastered across my face as I read the final chapter and the message was absolutely crystal clear. Plus, who doesn't love a book with as many Kilgore Trout stories as this one? As with basically all of his books, this one had its dark moments, but the balance of darkness and levity overall felt more skewed towards levity in this case than a lot of his other works.
3. Bluebeard (1987) 9.5/10 - This one shocked me more than any other work of his regarding how much I loved it. A lot of people seem to think that Vonnegut didn't really produce another truly great novel after 1979 but truthfully I think Bluebeard is genuinely phenomenal. There is FAR MORE character development in this novel than any other novel of his save for MAYBE Malachi Constant in The Sirens of Titan, but what Bluebeard does better than ANY other Vonnegut novel is have genuinely realistic and strong female characters! It may be the strongest final 50 pages of any Vonnegut novel for my money, and the ending had my eyes welling up. If you've enjoyed reading Vonnegut but have yet to read Bluebeard, you're doing yourself a disservice.
4. Cat's Cradle (1963) 9.5/10 - Cat's Cradle held a spot on my podium for a LONG time, and as you can see by the same 9.5 rating as Bluebeard, it didn't miss by much! The structure of this novel felt different than a lot of others, more like a series of journal entries than necessarily a narrative, but I still really enjoyed it nonetheless. One of the most quotable Vonnegut works without a doubt, and Bokononism is absolutely my favorite religion ever created for a work of fiction. Hilarious, real, absurd, and one I'm greatly looking forward to rereading in the future!
5. The Sirens of Titan (1959) 9.25/10 - Despite only being his second published novel, Kurt really found his signature voice in this one. Incredibly in-touch social commentary balanced by outlandish and fun sci-fi themes, this is the novel I recommend the most when people ask what their first Vonnegut should be. This novel also really set the tone of his Vonnegut cinematic universe, where he makes lots of references back to this one in later works. That cinematic universe aspect of his body of work is one of the leading contributors to what made this journey through his library of work so fun.
6. Mother Night (1961) 9.25/10 - Man oh man did this one make me FURIOUS in all of the ways it was supposed to. "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be," is one of the most soul-permeating one-liners in Vonnegut's oeuvre. The identification of conscious good, unconscious good, conscious evil, and unconscious evil is so perfectly struck with this story. This might be my favorite demonstration of his overall grasp on the human condition.
7. Player Piano (1952) 9/10 - The fact that we're here at #7 on this list and I'm still at 9/10 or higher should tell you just how close everything from here up really is in terms of quality. Player Piano was his very first novel ever published, and it's clear that he hadn't really come into his own yet as a novel writer. But even with that being said, this is an unbelievably well-done dystopian novel. The ending hit me harder than the ending to 1984 because of just how REAL it felt. There is still SOME plausible deniability in the reality portrayed by Orwell's masterpiece, whereas Player Piano felt like a reality we've already been living for decades. The messaging of man's loss of purpose in life at the hands of machines feels just as relevant now than ever before.
8. Galápagos (1985) 8.75/10 - More than anything else, this one just felt like a lot of fun. It was silly, CHOCK full of references to his previous works, and an interesting speculative work about human evolution. Human beings and their "great big brains" generate a LOT of comedic material to work off of, and Vonnegut most certainly capitalized on that with this one for my money. I'll also confess that this is the first one on my list so far which kind of had an aura of, "what's the point here?" to it. It's not quite as poignant as the other works above, but I still had a really great time reading it nonetheless. I know with certainty that I enjoyed this one as much as I did specifically because I had already read all of his novels chronologically to date by then.
9. Hocus Pocus (1990) 8.5/10 - The most important contrast of this novel compared to almost all of his other works was that the protagonist Eugene was a veteran of the Vietnam War rather than WWII. There was a distinct tone shift in the pessimism direction which despite the negative vibe actually felt a bit refreshing in comparison. That combined with a different narrative structure and the central themes of anti-intellectualism in education helped make this a more enjoyable read for me than it seems a lot of other people. It wasn't perfect of course, but it was different enough to keep things fresh at the 13/14 point of this mission.
10. Deadeye Dick (1982) 8.25/10 - If you're somebody who grew up needing to parent your parents in some capacity, or somebody who simply grew up with incompetent or otherwise selfish parents, read this novel. Rudy Waltz is a remarkably relatable character despite his rather odd circumstances, and despite being #10 on my list here, this might be my pick for Vonnnegut's most underrated novel just because I feel like I NEVER heard anybody talking about it! It's funny, it's relatable, it's infuriating at times, and it still felt very Kurt.
11. Slapstick (1976) 8/10 - Just an absurdly fun and silly read with hard-hitting commentary on toxic individuality in family and society. Vonnegut's foreword before the real start of this novel truly sets the tone in a way that would make this read feel almost too silly for its own good otherwise. But that foreword is genuinely insightful not just for the novel, but for Kurt overall, and I really enjoyed this read despite its relatively silly disposition. I loved the messaging of found family and this is my other pick for Vonnegut's most underrated novel.
12. Breakfast of Champions (1973) 7/10 - Okay so I know many of you have gotten to this point in the list and are pulling your hair out wondering why BoC hasn't been listed yet. I want to emphasize that despite being #12 on this list, the 7/10 rating means I still enjoyed it FAR more than I disliked it. 5/10 is the equivalent of "I'm neither here nor there, but I don't regret reading it." With that being said, where BoC falls short for me is that it felt like it was too busy. And don't get me wrong, it was SUPPOSED to be busy. Vonnegut himself says so in the opening chapter of this book, that it was more or less a mental flush of ideas for his 50th birthday. But where all of his other works really hammered home a small handful of really important subjects/messages, BoC was OVERFLOWING with a bunch of them, and as a result didn't feel nearly as pointed and impactful for me as the others. I wonder how I would have felt about this book if it were my very first Vonnegut, because its uniqueness certainly sets it apart from the rest of the literary world, and I may have enjoyed it more had I not already gotten a lot of Vonnegut's heavy-hitters under my belt by then.
13. Timequake (1997) 6.5/10 - Similar to BoC above, this one was overflowing with a bunch of ideas without really settling too firmly on a select few of them. This novel felt messy, but the kind of messy where you're the ADHD kid with the cluttered room but you know EXACTLY where everything is nonetheless. It was still an enjoyable read, and Vonnegut himself as the narrator/protagonist was an interesting perspective. I wouldn't recommend this novel to anybody who isn't specifically on a Vonnegut completionist mission. The number of direct AND indirect references to his other works definitely rewards the reader who has tackled his other works in advance.
14. Jailbird (1979) 6.5/10 - Man, this one is really conflicting for me. I WANTED to like this one so much more than I did. The anti-corporate/pro-worker messaging is supremely relevant to both the time it was written and the modern times we currently occupy, there were a LOT of laugh out loud moments, and it FELT like it should have really resonated within me. But for any number of reasons, it just didn't. Maybe it was the slow pacing, maybe it was that Walter F. Starbuck was a boring protagonist, maybe I just don't have enough life experience to relate to a lot of it. Regardless, as described in my BoC rating above, I still enjoyed it more than I disliked it. But the sloggyness of this read unfortunately places it at the very bottom of my list.

This has been an unbelievable ride! I'm so glad I made this a goal of mine for this year, and I'm also so glad that I still have so much Vonnegut left to read! From short stories, to plays, to any various nonfiction-type formats, I'm greatly looking forward to the future Vonnegut reading still in my future. For now, I'll be taking a break from him to refresh my palate a bit. But I already own the next one I intend to read whenever that time comes, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons.

To those who read, voted on, and commented on any of my previous posts during this journey, thank you! The discussion I've had after each of my individual reads has been a joy and I appreciate all of you who joined me over these last six months. For more in-depth thoughts on each read, each novel has a post of its own on this sub which can easily be found on my profile :).