Review #23 - Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions is about two men, one a sci-fi writer and another who takes his stories as literal truth. It's a sci-fi book that disguises itself as a contemporary novel and questions the relationship between authors and their characters wow I sound pretentious. 

The story is written in a very literal way. It's like when at school when a teacher says write about respiration as if you were explaining it to an alien and I always think that in order to do that you have to explain every single noun and how it is an odd task to set but Vonnegut does explain nouns in a literal and funny way (he explains what an apple is). I enjoyed that more than I thought I would. It's similar to Hitchhikers but less boring and funnier (all of you Hitchhikers followers are going to curse me, aren't you?). My favourite quotes include:

Maple syrup is "candy made from the blood of trees"

"It is harder to be unhappy when you are eating"

The book is filled with illustrations in black felt tip which I absolutely loved (that being said, some are a little too literal don't read this book in public). Here is one that is not a problem to put on my blog:

I found it hard to keep track of which character was which at the beginning as them were both the same stereotype and the narrative flicked from one to the other almost seamlessly which did make me disrupt my reading so I didn't love that. It took away from the plot. Once I got into it it was ok though.

The pace varied from slow to really exciting towards the end. Luckily in the slow bits there were lots of drawings so it kept me interested. The ending got really excited and I loved that. The ending was even more clever and insightful than the rest of the book.

I loved the relationship between the author and the characters and it was so well done. Vonnegut was very much a character within his own novel.

I gave this four stars