Cat's Cradle

AuthorKurt Vonnegut Jr.
FinishedMay 06, 2020
Rating4.3 / 5

Goodreads link


Overall I liked this book a lot. It was pretty easy to read in a refreshing way. Vonnegut was very funny. I liked the ways he made fun of humanity, religion, relationships, government, and basically everything else.

Writing Snippets I Liked

  • "free-form as an amoeba" (3)
  • "So many different people in the same device" (3)
  • "withdrew flaccidly, as though from a queasy dream" (126)
  • "the scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and i wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry" (164)
  • "lips glistening with albatross fat" (257"

Themes I Liked

  • TOO much scinece
    • Dr. Hoenikker: "I don't think he ever read a novel or even a short story in his whole life, or at least not since he was a boy. He didn't read his mail or magazines or newspapers, either. I suppose he read a lot of technical journals..." (10)
    • "Here, men are paid to increase knowledge, to work toward to ned but that... New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become." (41)
    • "Pure research men work on what fascinates them, not on what fascinates other people" (49)
  • Science and superstition
    • "The trouble with the world was that people were still superstitious instead of scientific... If everybody would study science more, there wouldn't be all the trouble there was" (24)
    • "You scientists think too much" (33)
  • Americans
    • "I was very upset about how Americans couldn't imagine what it was to be something else, to be something else and proud of it" (97)
  • White People
    • When narrator tells Mona he loves her and then she says the way she loves is with everyone and then he's like "I don't want you do to do it with anybody but me from now on" (207)... White people with their own definitions of love and hypocritical too because he's def had a lot of sex and two other wives WTF
    • and then at the end ironically he DOES get Mona to himself bc it's just them stuck in their bunker
  • Funny
    • "I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead" (68)
      • HAHA like the people who turned to stone from ice-nine at the top of Mt. McCabe at the end of the book
  • Humanity
    • The paradox about humanity: "The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it" (284)
  • Bokonon's last message: "If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow..." (287)
    • is the narrator Bokonon??