November’s Reading Group Selection is Kurt Vonnegut’s final novel Timequake. Due to Thanksgiving, the Book Group will meet Monday, November 29th at 7pm at Goldfish Teahouse (117 W. Fourth St., in Downtown Royal Oak). All are welcome to come and books are discounted 15% at Book Beat. Any questions, please call Book Beat at (248) 968-1190.
Timequake‘s a mongrel; it is half novel, half memoir, the project of a decade’s worth of writer’s block, a book “that didn’t want to be written.” The premise is standard-issue Vonnegut: “…a timequake, a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they’d done during past decades, for good or ill, a second time…” Simultaneously, the author’s favorite tricks are on display–frequent visits with the shopworn science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a Hitchcockian appearance by the author at the book’s end, and frequent authorial opining on love, war, and society.