Slaughterhouse 5

The writing style was interesting. I didn't like the whole “so it goes” refrain throughout the book. This was an odd one because it's so insane. It's like hearing the thoughts of a crackpot for hours on end. I guess some people are into that since this book is so highly rated, but it wasn't all that rewarding to me. The Dresden bombings killed around 25,000 people, where Vonnegut writes of 135,000 dead. Perhaps that should be revised to reflect reality, but obviously that would be a bit odd posthumously, and the book's comparison with Hiroshima and Nagasaki wouldn't hold up as well, since both were more deadly than the modern estimates of Dresden's bombing, so that would all have to be removed/rewritten.

The “war is hell” message is very clear, and this book presents that rather well when it can stay on topic (not talking about aliens) for a few pages. The whole alien bit I thought was very scarce on detail, barely qualifying as sci-fi at all. It's interesting to think about creatures who can peek at any point in time, and who have proof that fate is real, but there's not really any good description of them in the book, and the interactions with them are mostly just as viewers of the human zoo.

I can't help but think that I completely missed the point here, and maybe reading this in more of a group context would help with that, but for now, I don't get it.