I just really, really regret not ever reading Vonnegut as a teenager. Would've been the perfect time. It's still good now, but I feel a bit like I have to time-travel while reading it in order to appreciate it more. I've also been told that this is not exactly the best Vonnegut to start with, especially as a full-grown adult with pretentious literary sensibility and high intellectual expectations. Still, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I like the wildly speculative and I'm a fetishist of sorts for evolutionary theory, even of the armchair variety.

Mr. Vonnegut puts to use a hyper imagination with Galapagos. This book is about big brains. Big brains, like big boobies, regularly get in peoples way. Fortunately, I have neither. They are in peoples way when riding a crowded bus, or crowded elevators or when actively engaged in a sport. And evolution. This book is about big brains, boobies and evolution. That's about all a person needs to know before reading Galapagos... after all, it's not likely you were going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

When I finish novels by Haruki Murakami or Kurt Vonnegut, I'm not always sure what I've read. That was definitely the case with Vonnegut's Galapagos. It was thought-provoking and I laughed a number of times. Did I understand it, though? For Vonnegut, nothing is serious. At the same time, these not serious parts are what most of us view as supremely important. When Vonnegut writes about the solution to overpopulation, for instance, it is really funny, but just how we adapt to a changing world is something we need to grapple with. I tried to imagine the evolutionary changes a million years in the future Vonnegut was describing. I even tried to figure out what was happening on the nature cruise of the century (circa 1986 AD). So, all in all, I enjoyed reading Galapagos, but I can't say just what happened. When I read it again (sometime in the future), I might understand more, but I'm not sure.