Farewell from the Monkey House

I still, almost 40 years after the fact, remember the first Vonnegut I ever read. It was the Welcome to the Monkey House collection. I remember reading Harrison Bergeron, as a bright kid in a rural public school with no track for bright kids, and really identifying with being forced to be something you're not for the convenience of others. I remember the gentle whimsy of Who Am I This Time? and the moral quandary faced by the protagonist of All the King's Men. Those stories have stayed with me, as have Slaughterhouse-Five, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, Breakfast of Champions, and others. Even Phil Farmer's pastiche as Kilgore Trout Venus on the Half-Shell has a place of pride in my library. Though I admit to not having read a lot of his work from the '90s, I treasure almost everything of Vonnegut's I read as work that had a goddamn voice and made you think, even if you couldn't go all the way with him to his destination. Even when he got a little gimmicky, it was for a reason (or at least, seemed to me to be), and he sure let those personal demons he was wrestling know they'd been in one hell of a fight. The world, as many people have been saying, will be a little less illuminated with him gone, but he sure left us some light bulbs.

and so it goes.