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We have just under three hours until midnight here in Central Time, but already my eyes are getting blinky. It's been a busy day, an incredible month, and an undescribable year. My husband is making progress on his recovery from knee replacement, but I think he thought having a minimally invasive procedure meant he'd be doing the cha-cha after 11 days.
The most amazing part of this week has been my mother-in-law's insistence that she's bringing my husband black-eyed peas tomorrow. Now my mother-in-law is a very good cook and we get along, but I had to get an att'tude that she thought she should bring peas up into my house on New Year's Day. I did hear my husband on the phone saying, "You know, Gail wrote a book about black-eyed peas." In fact, at this moment, I have frozen black-eyed peas, canned black-eyed peas, and refrigerated black-eyed peas. I think I'm up to the task. Now don't YOU forget to eat those peas!
So I look forward to the new year, making black-eyed peas for my family, and the new challenges a new year will bring. So Happy New Year, all! May January 1st be just the beginning of a year full of good luck and incredible love for everyone!
Oh, and GO, ILLINI!
Newspapers around the world yesterday reported the death of writer Kurt Vonnegut at the age of 84.
His books such as Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Slaughterhouse-Five faced many challenges over the years, likely for their dark, satiric humour.
The Columbus Dispatch describes his novels as "classics of the American counterculture" and go on to compare his humour to that of Mark Twain.
Like Mark Twain, Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism.
He was the author of 14 novels and wrote in other genres as well.
His experience of the fire bombing of Dresden during the war was the basis of Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969, just as America was experiencing the war in Vietnam, racial unrest, and other social upheaval. It struck a chord with American society. The author became a cult hero when Slaughterhouse-Five became a best seller. It was challenged in schools and public libraries for its violence, sexual content and rough language. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the
PEN writers' aid group and the
American Civil Liberties Union.
Boing Boing offers a podcast of the very
first reading of Breakfast of Champions by the author.A number of people who are signed up for the "
Banned Book Challenge" are moving the order of their books or adding a Kurt Vonnegut book to their list, in honour of his passing.