Kurt Vonnegut and the Temple of Doom

The only other Vonnegut work I've read aside from "Welcome to the Monkey House" is "Slapstick" and I can say without a doubt , "Monkey House" is way better. The stories short and simple, but they aren't any less comical or poignant for it.

Of EPICAC and "All the King's Men" I enjoyed the former. The chess game premise was an engaging set-up, but somewhere in the middle of the game it started to lag and became somewhat predictable (I mean, who didn't see sacrificing a kid to save the troops coming?). EPICAC, though not as comical as some of the works we read last week, was a nice man/woman/machine love triangle, and works with self-aware computers tend to turn out well. Vonnegut has a way of weaving humanity, technology, love and war together in a way that has some splendid results.

I didn't dislike "All the King's Men," (in fact moments after finishing it I told one of my roommates to pick it up and read it) I just felt it could have been tightened up in the middle. Also, and it may just me who had this problem, I had a hard time segregating Pi Yang from the Asian smuggler who tries to swindle Indiana Jones in "The Temple of Doom." They were both the same kind of cocky, shallowly drawn characters. Still a good read though.