Welcome to the Monkey House and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Review

As 2023 comes to a close, I've decided to be upfront with those who know me or follow my reviews or reading journey. I read Welcome to the Monkey House and Breakfast of Champions, written by Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors after reading Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle in 2022. But I realized after manically reading these two as well as A Man Without Country that I am not a huge fan of the former two, much to my chagrin and deep disappointment. 

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Vonnegut so I was shocked and horrified to find that I didn’t really “get” Breakfast of Champions. I thought I could get behind any level of zany and eccentric and weird that Kurt could throw at me. I’ve been strapped in since Ice-Nine and Bokononism in Cat's Cradle, since porn stars on planets and plunger shaped aliens in Slaughterhouse-Five. Throw it at me! But even I draw the line sometimes. What was going on in this book? Even after reading it, I had no idea what I just read. But, I will say that I enjoyed the journey, and maybe that's most if not all of what Kurt had hoped to achieve with this one. I love the random snippets of Vonnegut style sarcasm and wit, so sharp and pointed towards racism and sex and politics and more. But is that all I was supposed to take away from it? I suspect there’s a greater meaning or symbolism that I'm missing, and I'm only so curious because I love his work so much and want to squeeze every last drop out of his writing and books. I hope to reread this one day so I’m glad I have a physical copy to come back to.

Welcome to the Monkey House was also a mixed bag. I loved some of the short stories in this collection. I loved the classic Vonnegut style ones with a mixture of his black humor and commentary, the famed Harrison Bergeron, the namesake of this collection, EPICAC (a chilling one given the rise of AI recently), The Foster Portfolio. And some of these shocked me with their lack of strange and unusual premises, Adam and Long Walk to Forever were sweet and sincere. But given the fact these were among a whopping twenty nine short stories honestly bored me. This is why I don’t really care for short story, essay, or poem collections. I hate sifting through an entire book to find a few gems. I’m an impatient reader, I blame technology and social media and my Gen-Z brain that goes haywire when I have to focus for more than five minutes, if not less. So I wasn’t a fan of the format of this book, but that’s not Vonnegut's fault, just mine. Anyways, I didn’t enjoy this one as much because of these reasons, but I liked better understanding his early writing and style because this was one of his earliest publications. I want to keep exploring his work to hopefully find more of his work that actually resonates with me deeply.