In May 2011, I clipped David Ulin’s “Summers of Discovery” from the Chicago Tribune. (It also appeared in the Los Angeles Times: “Critic’s Notebook: In Discover Mode.”) I had thought I would reread Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle that summer, but we know how that goes, right? More than six years later, though, I finally returned to the novel, and as I mentioned in my last post, it still resonates.
p. 164
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.”
Nerdishly 