Listening to Kurt Vonnegut

While searching through the archives at Bookworm, my favorite radio show, I found this wonderful interview with Kurt Vonnegut from April 2006. Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors. "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Cat's Cradle" are two of my favorite books of all time. He's one of the first authors I came across that could make me laugh and make me cry in the same book, sometimes in the same line. In his eighties now, he's still writing and thinking and engaging with the world in such a deeply felt way that just listening to him makes me feel the way I do when reading his novels--I laugh at what he says one moment then cry the very next. He's the sort of person who makes me believe in those characters so well-known in science fiction and fantasy novels who function as an old wise man or woman, seer, visionary. Listening to him makes me feel hopeful.