also: this catalogue entry is wrong

the record here says 1956 and credits ryan north, which is the graphic adaptation from a few years back, so somebody has merged two editions into one entry. the novel is 1969. i read the novel.

structurally it's a man unstuck in time and the sequence is the argument: you get dresden in fragments because that's the only way it comes back to him. the tralfamadorian bit about reading a book as a single object, all at once, is the cleanest description of what this novel is doing to you while you hold it.

so it goes turns up a bit over a hundred times, once per death, including the champagne. i counted a stretch of them and then got bored. the tic is working, though. it flattens a firebombing and a dead dog into the same register and then lets you feel the flattening.

the first chapter is vonnegut in his own voice explaining that he couldn't write the book, and i'd rank it above most of what follows it. 8.