Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut, 1969)

Slaughterhouse-Five neatly falls into the Venn diagram middle of "books that are classics" and "books I genuinely want to read"...and maybe throw in another circle of "books I really should have read in high school."

I discovered Vonnegut through the science fiction path. His early works up through Cat's Cradle easily qualify, putting him alongside unlikely folks like John Updike (and Jonathan Lethem I suppose) as authors who committed acts of science fiction in their career that are not regarded as science fiction authors. Before now I've read the aforementioned Cat's Cradle, Player Piano, and the perhaps not-so-SF God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. More importantly, I also have read the story collection Welcome to the Monkey House, which holds a tone closest to this book, and also includes the important libertarian-SF classic "Harrison Bergeron".

If anything this may be a step back toward SF from God Bless, although if you want scientific explanations for things like time travel, you will be disappointed. It's just a fact here that Billy Pilgrim jumps randomly through time, everywhere from his childhood to his deathbed, and, critically, his war experience, which includes the fire-bombing of Dresden.

The book owes a fair bit to its predecessors, with characters like Kilgore Trout and Eliot Rosewater making appearances. Also, in an almost Michener-esque way, the book doesn't even begin properly until the second chapter, as the first is devoted the conception of the novel by Vonnegut's alter ego...his non-Trout one, to be clear.

Finally, I'm not one for trigger-warnings, but if you are unable to process a horrorific scene of animal cruelty, you may wish to proceed with caution with this book. Make no mistake, the reward of reading a classic outweighs this single scene, but it remains burned into my mind's eye and still makes me shudder to imagine. Also, it was around this time that books other than Catcher in the Rye could use salty language (and quite frequently), so bear this is mind as well if you were thinking of suggesting this for younger readers. Any mature adult shouldn't have a problem with this, though.

I picked up a mangled old copy of this book from the public library that, while probably isn't a first edition, has pretty much the same layout and pagination. Since this is a pretty regularly assigned required reading book (accepting the aforementioned caution), it isn't hard to locate paperback copies on the cheap.