Loving Lit

I don't know if any of you have had the pleasure of seeing a man sporting a t-shirt that has the phrase, "so many books, so little time" on it. If you have you are probably aware how wonderful a moment such as this is. The sweatshirt is clearly the crux of the outfit while the rest of the ensemble is usually an afterthought. It is clear that as long as the sweatshirt is readable to the general public, then the person does not care about the rest.

If you happen to catch a man of this caliber walking around your neighborhood then you are aware of the impact he has on your life. If you are not a fan of books, then you most likely will scoff at the man's seemingly offbeat attire. For the record this is all speculation because I do not fall into that camp. I, and others who are a big fan of books, look at this man and understand his concern. We not only empathize, but we mentally applaud him for expressing himself. There is just so many books to read and so little time to read them.

I had a professor at UCSC whom wore that shirt constantly. I loved this man. He was not only an amazing history professor, but he had an uncanny resemblance to author David Sedaris.

Sedaris entered my life early in High School. My mother tried to get me to read a copy of his novel "Naked" many times. However, I didn't pick it up cause I was at the time too occupied with the Harry Potter series. Yet, it all worked out in the end because J.K Rowling took so long to come out with her fifth book that I forgot all that had happened in the series so far and thus decided to abandon Hogwarts altogether. After my bitter departure from that magical series, I drowned my sorrows in another book. Luckily, my rebound affair turned out to be Sedaris's, "Dress Your Family In Corduroy." I was just fascinated that someone could take the world around them and pick apart life's little idiosyncrasies in such a way where you cannot help but laugh. Although Sedaris was truly a gateway drug into my life of books, it wasn't until I picked up a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" that I finally learned just how important literature is.

I had always heard the title "Slaughterhouse Five" growing up. Now that I think of it, it is funny that I had never picked up the book before being the horror movie fan that I am because nothing screams macabre more than, "Slaughterhouse Five." After I had read the first part of the book I knew that this guy had the same thing that Sedaris had, yet he had the gaul to deal with life. Don't get me wrong, I love stories of Sedaris's that deal with the unflushable turd that haunted him at a friend's dinner party, but using humor to explore the parts of life that normally scare us is absolutely brilliant. To me it seems there really is no other way to deal with the things that terrify us, because as Mr. Vonnegut said himself, "Humor is an almost physiological response to fear."

I could go on talking about this book all night. I could even talk about my "favorite parts" that really inspired me. Yet, the point of this blog was just to let you know how I was first introduced to one of my favorite authors in hopes to inspire you to pick up one of his novels.

I guess I could leave you with a couple of Vonnegut quotes.

"The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth."

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."

"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."