Every now and again, I say a little prayer of thanksgiving that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote. His works were very popular when I was a young adult in the 1970s, and they were also recognized as literature. Although I read several of Vonnegut's science fiction novels, two were my favorites, worth rereading: 'Slaughterhouse 5' (which revolves around the bombing of Dresden, Germany which Vonnegut experienced as a prisoner of war) and 'The Sirens of Titan'. The books casually introduce the reader to issues of time travel and the domination of one's mind by others through thought control. Both of these concepts were foreign to me, and I read of them as interesting, but, of course, fictional.

Except that Vonnegut wrote with such detail and confidence. Perhaps he was still suffering from what he'd witnessed during World War II and experienced these kinds of imaginations as real. He wrote convincingly in sometimes tragic, sometimes humorous ways. In 'The Sirens of Titan', many humans have been shipped to Mars to be trained as military. Soldiers' thoughts about straying or goofing off are promptly interrupted and punished with a burst of nerve-stimulated pain.

He writes of a soldier whose mind is so regularly erased, he's taken to hiding a little list of facts that he can refer to once he emerges from his treatments. Befuddled after one such event, he is ordered to take part in the execution of another soldier. The victim before he dies reminds his confused executioner of the list. After the death, the soldier finds the list, only to discover the man who was just executed was his best friend.

As a girl with an ordinary upbringing, grievous events like bombings and cruel executions were hard to fathom. There were history books out, but Vonnegut's quirky understanding of how the universe works, and his ability to create memorable characters who stumble through the realities and surrealities of life, prepared me for the possibility of the improbable and the extraordinary.