Armageddon in retrospect

Your moods are in flux during a day (right?). Different moods require different books (right?). Also, different situations require different types of book.

For instance, you are reading over breakfast and need some way to hold the book open without using your hands. You need a thinnish paperback that slides under your bowl with bending the spine. You are sitting outside. You need something sturdy that you can plonk on your lap or on the ground without the pages constantly flipping over. You need a thick hardcover.

(Right?)

I appease this fickleness by reading different books of different formats at one time. A fiction, a non-fiction, a science fiction. Sometimes I read multiple books from each type, provided they are easy to distinguish. In addition to reading Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, I am also reading Armageddon in retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut.

(I confess, I have only now learnt to spell the word Armageddon. Don't judge me; at least I'm honest.)

This is a collection of short stories. I generally don't enjoy short stories, but the Byliner single series on Kindle has converted me. (Margaret Atwood has left me biting my knuckles bloody for her next installment - and I swear, she knows it! - and Nicole Krauss has intrigued me.)

I expected something different. Something more brutal, set in the middle of the action, throwing grenades at the reader - tsa tsa tsa. What I am getting is a Sunday drive that ends when the path becomes overgrown from disuse and a smoke bomb is set off overhead. Tssssssssaaaaaa. (Imagine I am out of the car by this time, else the metaphor doesn't work. Hang on, perhaps I should be taking a Sunday walk, but then where would it end...?)

I am only on the third story (I skipped the blah-blah of the son's introduction and a speech by the author - publishers need to start putting these things at the end, after we're finished reading - which took out about a third of the book - bastards), but the story "Guns before butter" has me dancing before the overgrowth, trying to figure out a way through short of scything the brush aside.

I won't describe the premise, because the moral will jump out at you if I do. But no! Two pages before the end, the moral is thrust aside by the flight of two pins but you don't know why at first, and really, I doubt you ever fully know, even though the writer convinces you that you do. You take a step further down the road (now you're taking a Sunday walk) and the brush begins to grow around you.

Those pins are rattling around in the corners of my apartment - not even in my skull, because my brain takes care of that - but out here in the real world. The short story will fall short of my excitement, I promise you, but that is because you are taking it on face value. Read it, think about it and listen to the pins drop (get it?).

At the risk of TMI, this is the book I read in the bath. It is light enough that I can hold it up without bruising the webby skin between thumb and index finger, and I can read one story in one, uh, sitting. Also, I need breaks from Sacred Hunger. I mean, it won the Booker, so what else did I expect from the novel?