I first read this book when I was probably fourteen or fifteen, at the suggestion of my brother. Instantly , I felt I had found some sort of pathway in the darkness that I could follow. Weird, funny iconoclastic and schlocky fun. "The Sirens of Titan" became a very important guide book to me, which is strange because ultimately it is just classic American paperback pulp of the 1950s. I don't know how many times I have read this book. Twelve times? I read it about every ten years now but when I was young it was always on my reading list or nightstand. "The Sirens of Titan" is really everything I ever wanted in a book; lurid sci-fi, memorable and weird characters that are half Twilight Zone comic book and half heros of a Greek tragedy. Weirdos, Invasion from Mars, "Kazak' the hound of space, the Chrono Synclastic Infundibulum, a lonely Alien from Tralfamadore waiting for spare parts for his saucer. Vonnegut was a huge influence on my life in High School and College, through probably his novel "Slapstick". After that he was just making house payments and telling interesting stories at lunch counters to who ever was listening. Sirens of Titan was always my favorite. It is truest to the Kilgore Trout world KV created and still very moving for me. The moral at the end is that we are all used to some end by an indifferent universe, but at least we are useful. The worst thing imaginable is to never be used at all.
When I was a young man, I wanted to write books like this. I wanted to have these images flow out of me into others. As a crumbling husk of an old man I read this book wistfully and wonder what happened. Re-reading this in my sixties, on vacation to France, it pushed all the same buttons as it did to the shy, fourteen year old in his bedroom in Redmond, WA, but instead of laying out a dazzling map to the future, it showed a chart of a small, now abandoned, theme park that I didn't build. As with everything in this stretch of life, regret and disappointment hide behind every tree and bush.
