Waiting for the movie after a little disappointment of the audiobook ...

This is about Brian Selznick's novel „The Invention of Hugo Cabret” that gave rise to famous 3D movie by Martin Scorsese. The story of 12 year old boy living in Paris, who cares for Parisian train station clocks after his father's death. The hunger and solitude force the boy to steel food. The boy tries to restore the artificial, mechanical man - The Automaton, discovered by his father in the museum he worked for, and where he later dies from fire. The boy finally succeeds to animate it and the automaton draws sketches that led to discovery of ... Well, I will not spoil it completely ...

I must admit, that the audio rendering in this case was not a good idea for such a book. It seems to have no climax, no conclusion one expects from the first few minutes of listening ...
Now, the physical book had about 300 illustration. And apparently these illustrations are as important as the words themselves.... See it in the book website.

The audio book has a lot of sound effects, but as it often happens these media are not quite convertible ...

So I do not say it was not good — I say that such books are designed to be visual... I also doubt it could be rendered properly as e-book. And that's paradoxically the best outcome from this disappointing experience. Finally we've got a book that saves the value of real, paper, physical books against all these bits...

And I will await the movie to be in cinemas in Europe....

Cat's cradle - Mega Mockery of our societies ...

Kurt's Vonnegut "Cat's Cradle" is one of the strangest books I've ever read.


The plot starts quite innocently with the narrator presenting himself as a writer planning to write a book about the American nuclear bomb inventor. This goal has perfect sense and is aimed at showing how "normal" was the life of those who, by their activity, created means to kill masses of people. In his pursuit, the narrator makes friends within the family and co-workers of the bomb inventor. They may hide the great secret of late father of the bomb - the mysterious Ice-9.
At this stage of the narration a fictional religion of Bokononism is introduced, with is fundamental concept of karass - the group of people, who are working together to fulfil God's will.

The plots goes crazy when the narrator arrives to a fictional island of San Lorenzo. Here, the events spiral quite fast. Shortly after arrival he is offered to become the president of the nation of the island - and he accepts that post, being in love with the women who was destined to be the wife of the president. Just at the moment of his inauguration as the president, the small plane crashed at the rock on which presidential palace stood and that crash ignited the sequence of events ending in the ultimate cataclysm with almost all the population of the island gone and with all water transformed at room temperature into hard ice after the spillage of Ice-9 in the accident.

Through this crazy plot, Vonnegut tells the most ironic refutation of our society, military pursuit, political system, "forbidden fruit" man-made religions and cults. The most important of those is the mockery of man-made religions. Bokononism, invented for the purpose of the novel, reveals so close resamblance to some cults and sectarian groups that we can only marvel about Vonnegut's wit and Machiavellian wisdom...

And I remembered _The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon_, which I had read in its entirety the night before. _The Fourteenth Book_ is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"
It doesn't take long to read _The Fourteenth Book_. It consists of one word and a period.

This is it:
"Nothing."