Breathe To Read

Breathe To Read

Sunday, February 17, 2019

Read The World - Ecuador - Galapagos

Book: Galapagos
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Pages: 336
The book takes place in the country: YES
The author is from the country: YES
I have visited: NO


This is my 22nd read of the year.  I finished it on 2/16/2019.

And now I think I am finally caught up.  Now there will be space between my Read The World post.  Aren't you glad?  Don't worry - I will find other things to blog about while I am in the middle of reading my country books.

I have actually read only one other Kurt Vonnegut book - "Slaughterhouse Five" and I really liked it.  So, when one of his books appeared for Equador, I decided to give it a try.


The story opens with a narrator from a million years in the future.  He brings us back in time to the 1980s when a group of people are about the take a cruise.  What the passengers don't know is that it is about the be the apocolypse and they will be the last survivors of the human race and whom all future humans stem from.

The narrator had died tragically young actually building the boat for the cruise of the last of the human race.  When he meets the "tunnel of the afterlife", where his family coaxes him to join them, he is distracted by the people on the cruise.  He is warned that if he doesn't join the afterlife at that moment, he would be stuck to wander the earth for one million years before the tunnel will be open to him again.  He decides not to go into the light and thus is now one million years into the future waiting for the afterlife tunnel to open again.

While he waits, he tells the stories of the passengers of the fateful cruise, who are sailing from main land Ecuador to the Galapagos islands, that are the last surviving humans.  

These folks are a random selection of passengers that are marooned on an island called Santa Rosalia.  The rest of the world becomes infertile and eventually humanity dies out.  Only the people on the island are able to reproduce and continue the human race.  Over the next million years humans evolve into furry spieces that look like sea lions - who have flippers instead of hands, and can swim more than they can walk.

The book goes back and forth between the narrator talking about the future and him recounting the lives of the people on the ship and how they all came to be together.  It is a pretty good book.  Quirky and disorienting and confusing, and great all wrapped into one.  I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

I encourage you to try the book.  Especially if you have read Vonnegut in the past.

Stars: 4


5 comments:

  1. I was so confused when reading Slaughterhouse 5 and just... didn't get it even though I studied it and everything was explained to me! So I'm not sure I will try another one of his but I am glad you could enjoy it so much ^.^

    My recent post: https://oliviascatastrophe.com/2019/02/the-familiars-book-review/

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  2. Husband loves Slaughterhouse 5 and it's on my tbr, I'll definitely be telling him about this one, sometimes I forget to look at what else an author has written besides their famous novel(s)

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  3. Mmm this sounds really interesting! I like old apocalypse or dystopian books! I never finished Slaughterhouse but I have been wanting to try again, this one sounds more interesting.

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  4. This sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I'd be able to get past the whole "the whole world is infertile except for this little group of ppl" thing. That just seems weird to me. Thank you for sharing

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