Monthly Book Review: October 2026
Monthly Book Review: Breakfast of Champions [Spoilers Included!]
Written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Why this book? This will be a bit of a knee-jerk reaction because I read it pretty casually and throughout the month of October and I just don’t know if I have a lot of takes on it. I have a good chunk of stuff on my plate, but I really wanted to get in the habit of reading fiction in my free time. This book was apparently left by one of the old housemates of the house I moved into in San Francisco - who was reportedly a bit of a dick. He left a lot of books so I took a bunch of them and this one was the first one I cracked.
I have read Vonnegut before but in sort of a forced-to-read-in-high-school type of way. Its a shame that so many people are turned off from fiction books becuase of this. You hear a lot nowadays about people being turned off from reading as adults becuase they were forced to in school. A lot of people list this as reasons they can’t get into reading for pleasure or specifically reading books that are commonly assigned in American curriculums. The thing is is that those books are in the curriculums for a reason they are usually brilliant works of art. For me, I was absolutely turned off by many of the books I was forced to read in school, but that was mostly while I was in school. Now, I feel as though I am more familiar with many of those books and have an urge to go back and explore them more thouroughly (as in whithout using SparkNotes). I don’t know if this is a unique feeling to me, but I know that I wouldn’t have felt this way if these books weren’t introducted to me at this time. So the implied effect is that if kids don’t like the books they are forced to read in the moment and then turned off from them from a few years, it may not be over and they might come around to them again. Anyways - this is all to say that I think I was forced to read Slaughterhouse Five at one point. I also kinda remember deliberately reading it as a teen. I was always someone who needed validation from somewhere if I was to read a book. I wasn’t about to commit hours and hours of my life to a story if it wasn’t critically acclaimed. I heard KVJ was one of the best writers we had in America and that was enough validation for me. Okay, now for the review.
Plot Recount from Memory: Breakfast of Champions is a story about several characters that are set to converge at a midwestern conference of the arts. The story is narrated by the author of the book who we later learn is a participant in the story. One of these characters the author creates is Dwayne, who is a successful, but lonely and unhappy owner of a Pontiac dealership who owns a stake in many of the businesses in his small town of Midland City, Ohio. Dwayne is on the verge of a breakdown becuase his wife killed herself and he is dealing with that emotional toll. Another character is Kilgore Trout, an author who lives in New York who has his (until then) little-renouned writings recognized by the art show in Midland City. He hitches a ride from New York to Midland City to be a guest of honor. The author hints throughout the book that something big will happen when these two character’s cross paths. He hints that Dwayne will read one of Kilgore’s fiction books and believe that it is a message from god - telling him he is the only real one of his creations and the world around him is essentially a simulation. These primary protagonists interact with a bevy of other characters in and around Midland City, as the day of the art show approaches and Dwayne and Kilgore meet.
The story is told in a way that only Vonnegut can tell in his style. It’s very accessible unserious writing that includes a lot of tangents and substories. His attention jumps around, but throughout, a picture is painted of the characters involved and the story unfolds. This particular story also includes alot of criticism of mainstream Americana in sort of a baby-boomery/counter-culture sort of way. The way Vonnegut critisizes the U.S. is by explaining it to the reader like we are beings from another Universe; aliens that have come to learn about earth. This perspective is incredibly entertaining. It is especially entertaining because throughout the book there are small illustrations of various things that aid him in depicting imagery. Because the author is describing Earth to us like we are aliens, he finds the funniest things to focus on. Amoung other things, Vonnegut describes seemingly strange practices and fixations that Americans have, the wars they start and participate in, and their consumerism. About ¼ of the way through the book, the author starts including either the penis length/girth (in inches) or the breast measurements of every new character he introduces. This is easily one of the weirdest, but funniest quirks of the whole book because sometimes you’ll forget about it until he starts describing a new character.
Whenever I read a book now, fiction or non-fiction, I don’t always like to know much about the book going into it if I have the choice. However, I always check the front for the date because with that information and a bit of knowledge about the author, one can have a better intial understanding of who they are and what they are reacting to. It also helps to know history as well as when certain paradigms have shifted so that you can truly understand the context that the writer is trying to grapple with. Every fiction writer is reacting to something in some way. Vonnegut’s style overall reminds me of the Baby Boomers and how they were really trying to bring-down the establishment in the ‘60s and ‘70s. By the ‘70s, a lot had changed, but a youthful cynacism developed as the BBers realized that they were still in Vietnam after 10 years and this was gonna be easier said than done. I imagine Vonnegut writing as a piece of that counter-culture puzzle. Overall, I applaud the boomers for pushing for the change they did - I think it was good in a lot of ways and also just needed doing. The strange thing is how reactionary that generation became. As someone who lives in the Bay Area its so interesting to consider the Boomers because many of them began their youth in the counter-culture, but then grew into the NIMBYs that we know and love. My uncle says that the counter-hippies of the ‘60s were all middle/upper-class college-educated white kids that were living off of their parents money or the governments while they were marching through the streets and throwing Molotov cocktails at cop cars in Berkeley. He tends to use this as part of an argument to disparage them, that the changes they wanted to see were less substantial becuase of their socioeconomic background. That the true Americans were the one’s that couldn’t possibly go out and protest the establishment because they were too busy working 10 hours a day at the factory trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Isn’t that the problem? What are you advocating for? That hippies should have shut up, go gotten a job where they could contribute to the economy and gotten a haircut? If the citizens of a country are too busy supporing themselves to challenge the status quo - are we in the political place that we should be? Anyways - Vonnegut’s book was good. I applaud anyone who can get people to think about anything. I want to start reading fiction more so I’ll try and do one of these per month at least.
STARS: *** (3/5)
[Edits and Additions]
