Galapagos

Kurt Vonnegut’s eleventh novel, published in 1985. The book is narrated by a voyeuristic ghost living one million years in the future. The ghost tells the story of cruise ship passengers who are shipwrecked in the Galapagos Islands and unintentionally become the breeding population for the next phase of human evolution. The cruise passengers all suffer from what the ghost diagnoses as the central malady of homo sapiens: having brains that are much too big. Their big brains trick them into doing all sorts of crazy things, including signing up for The Nature Cruise of the Century. Funny and sweet and sad, “Galapagos” distills the insanity war and the modern world, as well as the chance encounters and random events that keep life going.

Blake P.