ON BOOKS ~ Galapagos...

MizB asks you to:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page.
• Share the title of the book the teaser comes from…that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

From pg. 208 of GALAPAGOS by Kurt Vonnegut (fiction)...

"Why so many of us a million years ago purposely knocked out major chunks of our brains with alcohol from time to time remains an interesting mystery. It may be that we were trying to give evolution a shove in the right direction - in the direction of smaller brains."

Oh how I love this book. Parts of it do come off as a bit dated now, but the overall theme about all that we, the human race, and our oversized brains are doing to make ourselves extinct is still very resonant.

This is a tale of "The Nature Cruise of the Century" to Darwin's Galapagos islands in 1986 and how the small group of people beached on one of the islands ends up becoming the future all of humankind. The detached narrator looks back on the pivotal moments leading up to and including that doomed cruise and how Natural Selection caused humans to survive and evolve - to a much simpler, survival based existence - with smaller brains leading to a future one million years strong and counting.

I absolutely hate spoilers. I don't even care to be reminded in the slightest about the plot before I read something. So it is very funny that I enjoy this book so much since throughout Vonnegut does nothing but spoil things and tell us what is going to happen point blank rather than via foreshadowing - that seems to be for sissies. As he himself said, "Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."

Vonnegut pokes fun at society and the problems we create for ourselves. His wry humor weaves around his more serious statements about such things as the atrocities of war. This book was devilishly fun. Read it if you want a satirical laugh about yourself and human nature. After all, in a million years you won't be able to read the book with just your flippers and your mouth.