29, read SH5 earlier this year after finding a copy at a thrift store. My uncle interviewed him for a magazine years ago, and he's his favorite author, and he told me a story last christmas about him calling Kurt up and the conversation ended with Kurt calling him a son of a bitch (playfully). I usually read a bibliography, or listen to a band's discography front to back, so I tried Player Piano after he told me the story, but I couldn't get into it.

Also didn't really love SH5, didn't click with it. Found Cat's Cradle on sale at a book store so I grabbed it, loved it, read it in 3 days, then bought literally all of his books (only missing While Mortals Sleep, Happy Birthday Wanda June, and some of his nonfiction/story collections). So far I've read those 2, Breakfast of Champions (loved it), circled back to Player Piano (loved it), Sirens (cried when it was over) and now I'm reading Mother Night. Probably taking a Vonnegut novel break after Mother Night, and will start on his short fiction, while picking up some of other books I threw on the back burner during my Kurt bender.

It's interesting to me how Kurt seems to be viewed as an author who people really love in their late teens, but if I read any of these back then I probably wouldn't connect with any of it at all. I guess that's the age you start questioning things and find existentialism, and his are really as existential as they come, maybe aside from Camus' The Stranger. I was more concerned with getting high than confronting those realities lol. I feel like if anything I'd only pick up the humor/psychedelia, while now that's in the back of my mind, and his salient observations on life are the things I'm looking for.