#131 in Classics
Breakfast of Champions
- 302
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
- Film 1999
- On screen
Affiliate link: buying through it supports BookRank at no extra cost to you.
Our view
“Breakfast of Champions” is Vonnegut in an unruly mood: a digressive, absurd wander through a Midwestern town, built around a car dealer and an obscure science fiction writer and scattered with the author’s own playful drawings. The comedy is dark and at times ferocious, touching on suicide, race and free will, and the story matters less than the voice. Readers who want a tidy plot may flounder; those who like satire with teeth will not.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. His seventh novel, it is set predominantly in the fictional town of Midland City, Ohio, and focuses on two characters: Dwayne Hoover, a Midland resident, Pontiac dealer and affluent figure in the city, and Kilgore Trout, a widely published but mostly unknown science fiction author. Breakfast of Champions deals with themes of free will, suicide, and race relations, among others. The novel is full of playful drawings made by the author.
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen once.
- FilmBreakfast of ChampionsIMDb
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.9 across 947 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 86% of the weight and the score stays at 7.9 — the Classics average of 7.7 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.7 | 70 | 7% |
| Google Books | 8.0 | 96 | 10% |
| Hardcover | 7.9 | 781 | 83% |
Frequently asked
How long is Breakfast of Champions?
It has 302 pages — shorter than 81% of the ranked books in Classics.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Classics — with scores between 7.8 and 7.9, closest to this book.
