Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Slaughterhouse Five. 1968.

A rude, humble, bashful, pulpy book

Kurt Vonnegut set out to write a classic but gave up and wrote a classic instead. I found the tattered little mass market paperback version a better edition to read than the gold blurb-encrusted trade paperback whose title in blocky all-caps looks like a violent action film starring Nick Nolte and Kurt Russell. But this is not that. Kurt Vonnegut by dumb luck lived through one of the most effective slaughters of any war in history—the firebombing of Dresden—in which more people were killed than in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The experience, like Billy Pilgrim's short, inept war career, was so ridiculous that no monument could be supported on such an absurd foundation. Instead he wrote a pulpy sci-fi novel with a surprisingly intelligent discourse on nonlinear time woven into a taut web of autobiography, metafiction, and pure fantasy. It elegantly stumbles, jerks, spirals, and stops. Three cheers for anti-hero Billy Pilgrim and incontestable nicotine-stained angel Kurt Vonnegut. Ignore this review but read that book.