Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

Hopefully you have heard of Kurt Vonnegut the author of “Welcome to the Monkey House” and many other science fiction novels. Kurt Vonnegut (see excerpt from Wikipedia) is a famous writer of fiction, who I used to read when I was in high school and then in college. I would often escape the world by reading his novels, particularly enjoying the stories that came from an incredibly creative mind.

I listened to “Welcome to the Monkey House” on Audible, and it was narrated by several different people, which actually made it more enjoyable. This 11 1/2 hour audio book is a collection of short unrelated stories, with each of the 25 stories ranging from 12 – 45 minutes in length. As I mentioned below Kurt Vonnegut is incredibly creative and he doesn’t disappoint with this book. The stories range from incredibly funny, very odd, to some pretty sad commentary on human behavior. Given the relatively short length of each story you could read or listen to one or more in a brief period of time, which only added to the enjoyment. The fact that they are totally self contained allows you to pick it up listen or read one of the stories and not have to worry about a time lag when you start reading again as is the case with a novel.

As kind of a side note; I recently listened to “Breakfast of Champions” one of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels and it was extremely interesting. Maybe I will write a book review on it in the near future.

Recommendation

Now if you are very young some of these stories may not resonate with you as there are a lot of references to things that happened in the 1950’s and 60’s. People like JFK and things like landing on the moon. On the other hand most of the stories are pretty much timeless and are pure science fiction. Kurt Vonnegut is a master at creating interesting if not quirky characters and exploring the oddities of human behavior and motivation in his stories. If you choose to listen to the book on Audible you will be thrilled by the excellent narrators chosen to read this book. If you are looking for a bit of a respite from reality then I highly recommend this book. I enjoyed listening to all but a couple of the stories and it kept me entertained for days.

Enjoy!

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Welcome to the Monkey House

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Welcome to the Monkey House

Excerpt from Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.  November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but dropped out in January 1943 and enlisted in the United States Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden and survived the Allied bombing of the city by taking refuge in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He later adopted his sister’s three sons, after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident.

Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel was reviewed positively but was not commercially successful. In the nearly 20 years that followed, Vonnegut published several novels that were only marginally successful, such as Cat’s Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964). Vonnegut’s breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. The book’s anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War and its reviews were generally positive. After its release, Slaughterhouse-Five went to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. He was invited to give speeches, lectures and commencement addresses around the country and received many awards and honors.

Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essays and short-story collections, including Fates Worse Than Death(1991), and A Man Without a Country (2005). After his death, he was hailed as a morbidly comical commentator on the society in which he lived and as one of the most important contemporary writers. Vonnegut’s son Mark published a compilation of his father’s unpublished compositions, titled Armageddon in Retrospect. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut’s short fiction including 5 previously unpublished stories. Complete Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. Numerous scholarly works have examined Vonnegut’s writing and humor.