I know this has nothing to do with parenting, but I was so hit by the news I wanted to join in the mourning:

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84

Vonnegut has always been one of my favorite authors, perhaps almost solely for emotional reasons. After slogging through Johnny Tremain, Watership Down and The Great Gatsby in junior high English class, I was starting to regret my reading level having advanced past Encyclopedia Brown. But then the teacher handed out the book that set my view of modern literature on its ear — Slaughterhouse-Five. I devoured it immediately, enthralled by the depth of character in Billy Pilgrim and the frankness of the language. I re-read it several times in a row. It turned my spark of interest in reading into a roaring inferno that has yet to be doused.

Goodbye, Mr. Vonnegut, you will be missed.

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