Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

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The opening line of Cat's Cradle (1963)--"Call me Jonah"--pays homage to both the Bible and Moby-Dick. The narrator, reluctantly admitting that actually his name is "John" (close enough?), nevertheless insists on self-identifying with the Biblical prophet: "if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still."

His flippant lie situates him closer to the Books of Bokonon--the fictional scripture of Cat's Cradle that commands one to "live by harmless untruths"--than to the Book of Jonah. But at the outset of the story, the narrator has yet to hear about Bokononism. Instead, his interest is of a purely scientific persuasion: he intends to write a book about the inventor of the atomic bomb, The Day the World Ended.

Cat's Cradle is dystopian science fiction in a darkly comic vein. Through 127 (short, Moby-Dick-like) chapters, the deadpan narrator discovers an apocalyptic world torn between mad science and ironic religion. The novel tarries with questions of knowledge, faith, the meaning of life, the folly of the world, and the ties that bind or unravel it. It was nominated for the 1964 Hugo Award and is often considered to be among Vonnegut's masterpieces.

Wisdom and Woe is a philosophy and literature discussion group dedicated to exploring the world, work, life, and times of Herman Melville and the 19th century Romantic movement. The group is free and open to anybody with an interest in learning and growing by "diving deeper" into "time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters."