faustus: (seventies)
faustus ([personal profile] faustus) wrote2010-05-14 09:57 am

SL Day 18

I got a couple of pieces of good news over the last 48 hours - the one of which I can say unlocked is that Ardal O'Hanlon is going to be performing at a gig near me.

LXVII: Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker (1980)
A love story set in a packet of Camel cigarettes... sorta. Minorly alternate history, involving the romance of an exiled princess and an anarchist bomber, taking in a secret history of the United States and filtered through the author's battle with his new typewriter. I really need to do some digging into Ralph Nader - I know the name from the evil of two lessers election, and knew he predated that, but he can't just have been a fictional character, surely?


LXVIII: Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird (1979)
Somewhere around Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut's novels gain a pattern of an autobiographical preface, nervously explaining which bits are true (Mark Bloody Lawson's wetdream), then a narrative posing as an autobiography. That's not entirely true of Slaughterhouse, but it has the preface even if not the posed autobiography. Jailhouse is the memoir of a minor player in the Watergate scandal, his memories of the socialist history of America and his involvement with the McCarthy hearings and the megacorp that owned 19% of America. Kilgore Trout has a bit part, as the pseudonym of a fellow inmate, and I need to think about that. I also need to think how this is sf. If it is. Near future? Systems.