Vonnegut's highly original story of WWII and of Billy Pilgrim, time traveller is a book that changed the way I think about the world. I recommend that everyone should read this at least once.

Sent to devon612 as my RABCK for March. Enjoy!

Thank you so much greenbadger! It's fun to win a sweeps :-)

Releasing to my library for banned books week

Sending to MmeClinton for the Wish List Tag Game.

Here is a Vonnegut novel I just never read, which is surprising to me.... and how appropriate that it found its way to me in New England after beginning its journey in Old England.... in the three-pack of surprise books sent to fulfill my wish list titles from devon612.... who is rapidly becoming my most active bookcrossing friend!! Merci!

Slaugterhouse Five is one of those "classics" which I had just never gotten around to reading; then I find I have two copies among my many to-be-read books and decided it was time! I like Vonnegut and I liked this book. I know at some time in the distant past I had seen a movie. The only thing I remember about the movie was the scene in the ruins of Dresden when a soldier finds a teapot an d almost unthinkingly puts it in his coat pocket for his wife, as the nostalgia bore upon him... and was then executed for thievery. And so it goes... the constant refrain throughout the book, each time someone dies, a real absurdist view. So much has been written about this that I choose not to write much. Billy Pilgrim is so hard to grasp, even though he is presented in so much detail as he flies back and forth in time to different moments of his earthly and beyond earthly existence. Certainly one comes away with a deep feeling of distraught emotion at the consequences of war which is never didactically thrust upon the reader but allowed to just seep into your con:
sciousness. It is a collage of real and surreal that manages to convey very deep distress. Vonnegut is aware of this and breaks the flow one time only, when Derby (the one who takes that teapot) confronts an American turned Nazi who is trying to conscript American soldiers to fight for the Germans against the Russians in the final moments of the war: "Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life. There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much this listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But old Derby was a character now." I am not really sure it is clear that Vonnegut truly believes the advice he has a Tramadorian give to Billy (who in future years is kidnapped by aliens and taken to another universe): "That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones." Is that the value of recording the awful times and then immediately dismissing them with an "And so it goes."?

Left for a friend to pick up!!