BiblioAddict

On Friday Night Delights, some video, finishing Slaughterhouse-Five, falling in love, and war in reverse:

So I decided to check in on BiblioAddict this evening before I turned in for the night only to discover that the makers of WordPress have rolled out a whole new Dashboard design on me! As with all things new some have their complaints, but personally I think it’s wonderful. As such, I don’t really have anything substantial to post at the moment, I just wanted to try out a few of the new features on my Dashboard at your expense.

But I do have news: I’ve finished Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Everything I said about this crazy-wonderful-beautiful-heatbreaking book and its author two posts ago still holds true. I loved this book. To paraphrase one of the reviewers, it was a funny book at which I wasn’t allowed to laugh, and a sad book that didn’t make me cry. It was one of those books that made me wish I’d studied it in college because there was obviously so much happening in this relatively short novel and I would have loved to spend weeks breaking it down and studying all the pieces that make it work so well.

But maybe that would have taken some of the magic out of it – I don’t know. What I do know is that I am eternally in George Saunders’s debt for convincing me to do what no other blogger or literary critic could. I not only loved this book but it is, without a doubt, now one of my top-ten favorite books, and I don’t say that very often.

There was one scene I found particularly affecting: it’s the one in which Billy Pilgrim imagines how beautiful war in reverse would look. If you’ve read the novel, you probably know what I’m talking about. If not, here it is for your viewing pleasure:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes few up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored nearly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the rack and shipped back to the United States, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous content into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anyone ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

And here is why I love YouTube: a dramatization of Billy Pilgrim’s war in reverse: