Welcome to Litsy!

It's incredible that this book was published in 1985. There's a proto-tech bro turned vulture capitalist buying up the assets of distressed countries out of sheer boredom; a handheld device that's part Google Translate, part WebMD, part Goodreads quotations; a financial crisis precipitated by the collective lack of belief in our monetary system; the devolution of humanity due to environmental factors; etc. This could have been written last week!

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

One million years ago, back in 1986 A.D., Guayaquil was the chief seaport of the little South American democracy of Ecuador, whose capital was Quito, high in the Andes Mountains.

Really great discussion on the podcast Backlisted on Vonnegut and the novel Galapagos, if you‘re interested. https://www.backlisted.fm/ and haven‘t already listened. The guest is author Shehan Karunatilaka whose Booker Prize winning novel I admired more than I loved, but I love him here as he declares his love for Vonnegut (and the band The Police). Very satisfying for Kurt Vonnegut fans.

My first novel by Vonnegut. I enjoyed this original and surprising satire!

"Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren't diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion anymore"

Don‘t feel well and have a sinus infection but I have Vonnegut and Cigarettes after sex playing so it isn‘t that bad

Narrated by Leon Trout (a ghost), he maintains that all the sorrows of humankind were caused by "the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain". Natural selection (Darwin) figures into the equation when humankind‘s only hope is to repropagate the human race at a remote island in the Galapagos with a handful of survivors, leading to a streamlined race (with smaller brains)...yikes. Hit-and-miss for me

#bookspin #doublespin

#firstlinefridays @ShyBookOwl

!?!?!

Here they are! #bookspin on left, #doublespin on right. I had so much fun doing 20 for #bookspinbonanza in May that I want to do it again. If I did that the rest of 2020, that would crush TBR significantly 🏔🔨
Thanks Sarah for doing this-it‘s quite motivating 👏🏻

@TheAromaofBooks

📕 Galapagos- Vonnegut
🖋 (Nikki) Giovanni
📼 Gummi Bears
🎙The Go-Goes
🎶 Girls Like Us - Pistol Annies
#manicmonday #letterG @JoScho

A quirky book - probably not recommended pandemic reading (what was I thinking?!?) - unless you like going down sarcastic apocalyptic roads! Just flippant enough to keep me reading, but the ending was at the beginning so no surprises, including how humanity can be so fickle in the middle of crises - sound familiar?!?!?

DAY 9 #LaIslaBonita | ⛰☀️🦎🌊🐢 This counts as a beautiful island. And I like to use Vonnegut any chance I can.

#MOvember
@Cinfhen

I forgot to post a review for this book! This is a weird, funny, fast-paced novel set in the Galapagos with a very interesting and entertaining take on global apocalypse. I don't want to say much more because it would be too easy to spoil this story. A very quirky enjoyable read - it was great company for me in the Galapagos!

My new view! Galapagos 🦎🦈

My new view! Galapagos 🦎🦈

Next up!

1. All of the above. I don't get to go on adventures or expeditions or even casual sight seeing. There's just no time.
2. Mountains & desert.
3. Trail walks and nature tours
4. Well, again I don't get many adventures, so I'd take any of it, but I am also a homebody.
5. I don't know if this is what was in mind for this question, but I love it.

📖 Galapagos
📝 George Orwell
📺 GoT
🍴 green chile smothered burrito

#manicmonday #letterg

Great❤️❤️❤️ Absolutely love it!!!

Nobody today is nearly smart enough to make the sorts of weapons even the poorest nations had a million years ago...During my lifetime there wasn‘t a day when, somewhere on the planet, there weren‘t at least 3 wars going on. And the Law of Natural Selection was powerless to respond to such new technologies. No female of any species, unless maybe she was a rhinoceros, could expect to give birth to a baby who was fireproof, bombproof, or bulletproof

It is a joke to me that this man should have presented himself as an ardent conservationist since so many of the companies he served as a director...were notorious damagers of the water or the soil...But it wasn‘t a joke to *MacIntosh, who had come into this world incapable of caring much about anything. So in order to hide this deficiency, he had become a great actor, pretending even to himself that he cared passionately about all sorts of things

About that mystifying enthusiasm a million years ago for turning over as many human activities as possible to machinery: What could that have been but yet another acknowledgment by people that their brains were no damn good?

I would have thought that your being sent by the wisest men in your country, supposedly, to fight a nearly endless, thankless, horrifying, and, finally, pointless war, would have given you sufficient insight into the nature of humanity to last you throughout all eternity!

More and more people back then, and not just Andrew MacIntosh, had found ensuring the survival of the human race a total bore.

As long as they killed people with conventional rather than nuclear weapons, they were praised as humanitarian statesmen. As long as they did not use nuclear weapons, it appeared, nobody was going to give the right name to all the killing that had been going on since the end of the Second World War, which was surely “World War Three.

I am reminded of one of my father‘s novels, The Era of Hopeful Monsters. It was about a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last moment. And then, with all the forests being killed and all the lakes being poisoned by acid rain, and all the groundwater made unpotable by industrial wastes and so on, the humanoids found themselves the parents of children with wings or antlers or fins, with a 100 eyes...

That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners ‘Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about.' And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it--have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular or....

Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren't diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion anymore.

Just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilogrammes! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute.
So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogramme brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?

Another great Vonnegut experience. I do love how he always connects his books (the majority of them it seems). The world ends and everyone dies, except for 10 people stranded on an island in the Galapagos.

#audiostitching while waiting for Man Cub to get out of school.
I took a nap today instead of cleaning so I‘m feeling a bit better.

Man Cub had a 24 hr stomach bug, he gave it to me yesterday. On top of that I just haven‘t been feeling great anyway, iron deficiency anemia and I think it might be getting worse, gtoday my back hurts in a not normal spot. And I realized we have apartment inspections tomorrow not Monday like I thought. 😭 I need a maid. #audiocleaning to the rescue for getting as much as I can handle getting done.

Made up my audio bingo tbl (to be listened to). The Man Cub is on my iPad so I have to wait to do my digital bingo card.

Several Vonnegut works are currently on sale for Kindle. Some of them have audio addition for $1.99 or $2.99

#LaIslaBonita #JuneTunz

40 bucks for the lot 🤓

Kurt writes about the power of evolution and nature like no one else, of course.
#readJaunary #booksaboutnature

Baby is out for a walk with his grandparents but I have to stay in to keep an eye on the turkey, so I'm enjoying a quiet moment with my book, coffee, chocolate and my amazing new mermaid blanket that my husband bought me for Christmas. Merry Christmas everyone!

Backing up to day 13 here... while I don't currently have multiple copies of this book, I have purchased so many! I love it so much that I always have loaned it out to folks and then of course, never get it back. #multiplecopies #seasonsreadings2016

#funfridayphoto: set in warm climates ☀️

#setonanisland #seasonsreadings2016 You can't go wrong with Vonnegut. This book, set in the Galapagos (obviously), looks at the fate of a group of people stuck on an island while the rest of the world is destroyed. Inventive and funny.

It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour.
A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That‘s all I can say.

Indy has some great literary gems including Vonnegut's personal typewriter at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. #getindie

"the Era of Hopeful Monsters"

Damn. The world is a crazy place.

Those troublesome, over-sized human brains! Cue reverse evolution and the shenanigans leading to it. This novel has a quirky format which describes what's GOING to happen over and over throughout the whole book. I liked the use of the asterisk to denote who was about to die. It was helpful and clever and different. Not my favorite Vonnegut so far, but decent.