100 by 30 book 10 - Slaughterhouse Five

Holy cow am I falling behind! In all fairness, Bioshock Infinite wasn't going to play itself, and going to Disney World has a way of cutting back on your reading time. Anyway, let the quest continue!

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

I thought it was about time that I read this American classic, and it did not dissappoint. It's like Douglas Adams if he wove eye witness accounts of American War atrocities into his genius Sci-fi comedies. This is one of those books that has so many big ideas that I don't really feel smart enough to talk about it after just one reading. But I will share what I learned anyway, then you all can fill me in on the giant themes I missed because I was laughing at his jokes about boobs and poop.

This is my first experience with Kurt Vonnegut, and I have to say, his writing style is different from anything I have ever read before. He breaks everything up into small chunks, usually not more than a paragraph or two, and it makes for very quick reading. Like eating a bag of snack food, you always want to read 'just one more'.

The book seems to be Kurt's own struggle with how to tell his experience at the fire bombing of Dresden at the end of WWII. He was in the city when American bombs killed over 130,000 Germans in one night. That's almost double the death toll from Hiroshima. I have to admit, even with a childhood of learning about WWII, I had never heard about what happened in Dresden. The magnitude of this event boggles the mind. 130,000 civilians murdered in a day. And then you realize that this pails in comparison to the total number of dead in all of WWII (about 50,000,000 soldier and civilians on all sides, including the holocaust) It's brain breaking the magnitude of evil committed in a 6 year span.

And so, we get a tale of this horror told through the eyes of eccentric Billy Pilgrim, who became unstuck in time. He was abducted by aliens that see time as just another demension. They can bounce back and forth to different parts of their lives. In this sense, death is meaningless because they are always alive somewhere. Like I said, This book is complex. We follow Billy has he bounces back and forth throughout his life; to his time in the war, then as a prisoner of war, then to after the war, we he gets married and becomes an optomatrist, and to his times as a zoo creature on Tralfmadore. This bouncing narrative creates a stew of different philosophies, ideas, and a healthy dose of absurd humor. I wasn't kidding about the boob and poop jokes. This is the kind of masterfull work that begs to be reread and Mr. Vonnegut has the rare ability to share huge ideas in easy to read chunks that make you want to start back at the beginning and reread it right away. Unfortunately, I still have 90 books to go, so rereading will have to wait. So it goes.

10/10