Galapagos

"He wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyways."

Kurt Vonnegut

Galapagos

I think the coolest thing about reading Vonnegut is how all of his characters in all of his books are related and interact. In Galapagos Leon Trout, the son of sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, tells the story of the end of humanity as we know it, and the beginning of the new race of humans spawned from the passengers of a wrecked cruise ship in the Galapagos Islands.

I loved this book. I love Vonnegut's writing and storytelling. He believed that all characters should be likable and that nothing should be hidden from the reader. The result, especially in this book, is phenomenal. You know from the beginning of the book that there is an apocalypse and that all of the survivors are descended from the passengers on the cruise ship, and that humans have evolved to live shorter lives, and not to have large, troublesome brains that could lie and have useless opinions that "were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be." You don't know the events that lead up to this, though, and it leads to a wonderful kind of suspense (this kind of suspense is also abundant in the Kingkiller Chronicles by Rothfuss).

This book also looked at how inconsequential our lives can be, and the quiet desperation that can stem from that feeling of supposed meaninglessness. It also looked at how profoundly influential our decisions can be, even in the long run. The struggle between these two ideas in the book were so wonderful and insightful, as I think most humans struggle with this question. As David Mitchel said "we are just a drop of water in a limitless ocean." And for the most part that may be true. But we should try to make a difference, to do things for good, because maybe we are that one drop that tips the balance.