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Jan 10, 2012

Bird Brian rated it:

The cover calls this an anti-war book, but I really didn't get that message from it at all. That characterization may stem from the fact that Slaughterhouse Five (SH5) was published in 1969, when anti-war sentiments in general were high, so maybe readers were just eager to believe it was anti-war. I think the heart and soul of this story is on page 198. It is twenty-three years after World War II, and protagonist Billy Pilgrim is speaking with another veteran:

"It had to be done,"

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16 comments like (55 people liked it)

Jan 02, 2010

Martine rated it:

I have to admit to being somewhat baffled by the acclaim Slaughterhouse-5 has received over the years. Sure, the story is interesting. It has a fascinating and mostly successful blend of tragedy and comic relief. And yes, I guess the fractured structure and time-travelling element must have been quite novel and original back in the day. But that doesn't excuse the book's flaws, of which there are a great many in my (seemingly unconventional) opinion. Take, for instance, Vonnegut's endless repeti More...

37 comments like (64 people liked it)

Feb 15, 2008

Kirstie rated it:

I read this book first in 1999 when my grandfather passed away. It was a bit of a coincidence as his funeral occurred between a Primate Anatomy exam and a paper for my Experimental Fiction class on Slaughterhouse Five. I was frantically trying to remember the names of all kinds of bones when I picked this up in the other hand and tried to wrap my head around it.

Basically, Vonnegut has written the only Tralfamadorian novel I can think of. These beings, most undoubtedly inspir More...

5 comments like (61 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Dave rated it:

Why do I love this book? I love it because of the villains. Not just the obviously villainous Paul Lazzaro--although he's one of the great villains of modern fiction. During the hellishness of war all he can think about is his own petty need to avenge slights done to him--but the larger, less obvious villains in this book: the Tralfamdorians. They’re not the type of villainous space aliens you see in most science fiction, arriving in flying saucers and hell bent on enslaving humanity, only More...

8 comments like (42 people liked it)

Jul 31, 2011

Lou rated it:

http://more2read.com/?review=slaughterho...

Highly recommended novel that demands a re-read. I found a really good review that put it so much better in perspective. When I read it again in the not so distant future I will add my own thoughts but for now this readers review here does so much better justice to the story.

"Kurt Vonnegut uses a combination of dark humor and irony in Slaughterhouse-Five. As a result, the novel enables the reader to realize the horrors More...

4 comments like (18 people liked it)

Jul 29, 2011

Stephanie rated it:

I miss Kurt Vonnegut.

He hasn't been gone all that long. Of course he isn't gone, yet he is gone. He has always been alive and he will always be dead. So it goes.

Slaughterhouse-five is next to impossible to explain, let alone review, but here I am. And here I go.

What is it about?

It's about war.
It's about love and hate.
It's about post traumatic stress.
It's about sanity and insanity.
It's about aliens (not the illegal kind, t More...

7 comments like (28 people liked it)

Mar 29, 2010

Steve rated it:

Soon after Vonnegut died quite a few stories were circulated about his real-life experiences as a POW in Dresden during WWII. Billy, the book’s main character, survived the firebombing just as Vonnegut did. Both recognized the good fortune of their underground prison vantage point when the flames incinerated the city above. Both had plenty to cope with, too. In telling Billy’s story, Vonnegut connects several themes. Not surprisingly, “war is hell” is one of them. Some of the other points More...

2 comments like (13 people liked it)

May 13, 2011

Gavin rated it:

There are only a few books that I ever really try to revisit. Sherlock Holmes and his stories are one. Some Shakespeare. And Slaughterhouse-Five.

I have read this book every year since my first reading almost ten years ago. I read it as an undergraduate; I read it as a graduate student. I've written three or four papers about it. And, yes, I have tried to pawn this book off on as many people as I could over the years.

You see, this book does something to me whenev More...

4 comments like (24 people liked it)

Feb 06, 2008

Amelia rated it:

I suspect that I am one of very few people who had never read this book. This being confirmed by some of my goodreads "friends", I had my task before me.

I have to say that over all I enjoyed it very much. It took me a few chapters to get used to his repetitive nature, and in the end grew to appreciate it. His descriptions, particularly of characters, stand out to me.

"It was a random, bristly beard, and some of the bristles were white, even though Billy More...

22 comments like (11 people liked it)

Jan 21, 2008

Shannon rated it:

Contains spoilers
Slaughterhouse-Five is about a man called Billy Pilgrim who time-travels frequently. He was in the Second World War and, captured, was sent to Dresden to work in a malt syrup factory before the city was bombed. He studied optometry and had a nervous breakdown. He married the daughter of a rich optometrist, and became rich as well. He was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who put him in a zoo with a young porn actress, Montana Wildhack, whom they also abducted. He More...

22 comments like (25 people liked it)

Mar 13, 2008

Danielle rated it:

So it goes.
I was a huge Vonnegut fan in high school, and had been looking forward to reading his magnum opus. However, I was disappointed.
I think the message of this book is valuable, and it would have lost some of it's power being told in any other way. However, I came away with a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like if I were listening to a rap song full of offensive language and references. Maybe the message of the song is meaningful, and valuable, but because of the presentation, More...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Nov 21, 2007

Debby rated it:

"I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone." I do not feel so all alone.

"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time...He has seen birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all events in between."

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." Ah yes, the building blocks of life that make sense to Americans.

" More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Apr 09, 2009

Daniel rated it:

Breaking with my usual habit of giving what I like to think are clear, well-reasoned explanations of why I did or didn't like a particular book, I'm giving "Slaughterhouse-Five" five stars with little elaboration. I'll simply say that this was my first time revisiting the book since first reading it in high school, and part of the reason for my high rating is that it held up incredibly well -- something I can say of few books I loved as a teenager.

Kurt Vonnegut's writing si More...

2 comments like (9 people liked it)

Aug 15, 2010

Amanda rated it:

Finally, I have completed my first Vonnegut.

Amazing that an introduction can make the book that much more touching. As personal as a novel can get, I guess. And as I read, I envisioned my future and my present wrapped into one, my Zeke and me lying as lovers in our fifties and happy, staring into faces I know to be real. Maybe it IS smart to focus only on beautiful things and put wars away in closed dark cabinets.

4 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 07, 2012

Cecily rated it:

A strange and intriguing book that I found very hard to rate: a mixture of wartime memoir and sci fi - occasionally harrowing, sometimes funny and other times thought-provoking.

It is the episodic story of Billy Pilgrim, a small town American boy, who is a POW in the second world war, later becomes a successful optometrist and who occasionally and accidentally travels in time to other periods of his life, so he has "memories of the future". Oh, he also gets abducted by alien More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Kelly rated it:

This was my first, and to date, only Vonnegut experience. I read this in my junior year of high school, tacked onto the end of the year. Mostly as an indulgence to my english teacher who was obsessed with Vonnegut and squeezing it in at the end of the year to have people to fanboy and geek out with after they'd read it. Then I read it and figured out why he was so obsessed. I have to say, this book yanked me firmly into modern literature. (At the time I was deep into my love for 18th and 19th ce More...

9 comments like (9 people liked it)

Mar 18, 2009

Tara rated it:

I pretty much thought this book was brilliant--I've read it twice now and I shall read it again. It is difficult to write about, and read about, a subject of horror. Because, c'mon, that's what it is. If the earth in Dresden becomes a veritable tomb for stinking, rotting corpses, and the few survivors have to spray fire into the holes to incinerate the rot because it is physically impossible to smell and touch the rot without hacking all your guts out...well, that's horrific. Yet Vonnegut mangag More...

1 comment like (8 people liked it)

Aug 19, 2008

Benjamin rated it:

At some point, every Vonnegut novel that I've read feels like it was written by a very intelligent twelve-year-old. The difference between his novels that I love and the ones that I find tedious is how much that child stays buried. This is the most successful. I really like this novel, and there are loads of phrases and scenes that are permanently burned into my mind. "What are you supposed to be?" It, like all of Vonnegut, is not for everyone. But I like it.

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Jul 05, 2010

Aldrin rated it:

I was introduced to Mr. Vonnegut when I first read his terrific short story, 2 B R 0 2 B. In no more than 17 virtual pages (I read it online for free), the famous American writer deftly painted a picture of a negatively Utopian and morally ambiguous future, where consensual homicide is endorsed by the powers that be and is just an operator-assisted phone call away. Reading 2 B R 0 2 B, I was afforded a taste of Vonnegut's immense talent as a satirical, absurdist science fiction writer--a brief y More...

4 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 31, 2011

Brigid *Flying Kick-a-pow!* rated it:

*sigh* Okay. I ... STRONGLY DISLIKED this book, for a handful of reasons. But honestly, I would never have picked this up on my own; I was assigned to read this for honors english class, and it's not something I would read normally. Not that I didn't give it a chance, because I did. I tried to like it. I really did. And for the first fifty or so pages, I was like, "Okay ... This isn't so bad I guess ..." But after a while, it just got so aggravating. The writing style started to drive More...

12 comments like (6 people liked it)

Aug 14, 2008

Destinee rated it:

I picked this up because I was looking at this website that had pictures of literary tattoos and an extraordinary number of people had "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" tattoos. I was like, "What is so great about this quote that all these people had it permanently inked on their bodies?" Turns out, the quote is kind of a non-sequitur. I mean, I'm sure you can figure out a way in which it's deeply integral to the book's themes or whatever, but in terms of the narrat More...

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Jul 29, 2008

Phill rated it:

I was not aware of Kurt Vonnegut when he passed away last year. I hadn’t read a single book of his, and that situation remained until a few weeks ago when, after watching a documentary on another fallen hero, Hunter S. Thompson, I decided to buy some of the books I had intended to a long time ago and never did. So in went Catch-22, South of No North, The Cheese Monkeys, and Slaughterhouse-Five. And out I walked looking like a ‘cult classic’ wannabe late to the party.

Slaughterhouse-Five More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Sep 17, 2007

Darga rated it:

i've been meaning to read some vonnegut for years and years. i finally picked this up, and two days later he died. hearing about the strangeness of time and how people never really die from a man who had just died made this book all the more powerful for me.

like all my favorite books, there are random tangents and commentary on all sorts of things. one of my favorite parts of the book is one character's critique of the bible:

"the gospels actually taught this: befor More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 30, 2010

Jack rated it:

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors and this may be his best book. High schools are using it today to lure kids into the thrill of reading and into the enjoyment of discussing something important about what they have read. What a dirty trick to play on these poor kids. If the kids are not careful, they may get hooked on Vonnegut and reading while the video games gather dust.

Billy Pilgrim, the novel's protagonist, has come unstuck in time. Billy bounces backwards More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 25, 2011

Punk rated it:

World War II/Alien Abduction/Time Travel. For decades, Vonnegut meant to write a serious novel about the bombing of Dresden. He wrote this one instead.

It's a critique of war, but it's also a story about a guy who's abducted by aliens and made to live in a zoo with an adult film star. So it's a Vonnegut novel, basically. It's gently sharp and sweetly sarcastic. Kilgore Trout shows up. Billy Pilgrim's unstuck in time. The Tralfamadorians believe that if someone dies, they're still aliv More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

May 12, 2011

Mark rated it:

I began this book in one of those ' i really feel I ought to read it ' type ways and began it with mass trepidation. Its an extraordinarily disjointed book covering the leaps back and forth through time and space of Billy Pilgrim our time travelling hero who spends part of his life trapped in a alien zoo as exhibit one, part of his life as a soldier who is none too sure of where he will be when he next wakes up and part widower with a none too subtle line in patient care. Initially I was thinkin More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jun 04, 2009

Michael rated it:

Ben Roberts gave me this book for my sixteenth birthday. I asked him what it was about and he said it was about World War Two and the bombing of Dresden and an American POW who is abducted by UFO's. But then he added that it was only kind of about those things, about those things but not really, hard to explain. Then he walked off. Anyway, I was definitely interested in WW2 at the time--and sadly, many, many other wars, some even nonfictional--and so that night at 16 when I flipped open the firs More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 28, 2012

Richard rated it:

I think this is one of those "love it/hate it" polarizing books. Fans of World War II history would appreciate its basis in factual events, but may be off-put by its use of space aliens as characters. Science fiction fans would appreciate the concept of time travel in a late-1960's novel, but may not appreciate the silly description of the alien Tralfamadorians Vonnegut provides. If you appreciate a book that doesn't follow a linear narrative, you may still be disappointed by this book More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 21, 2009

Joel rated it:

I'm on the homestretch with this one. Call it a reread if you would like. Originally, I listened to this on audio book a few years back with Ethan Hawk as narrator, and to be brutally honest to poor Ethan: his reading really detracted from the harsh beauty of this novel.

I didn't know much about Vonnegut before listening to it and felt that it was a good idea to read it though without the vocal distraction. Boy, am I glad I did. The time-traveling Tralfamadorians world view is so dis More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Nov 20, 2010

Jamie rated it:

An interesting read. I enjoyed the quirky writing style; I need to look for more of Vonnegut's books.

I wouldn't label this as science fiction or call it a time-travel novel, since it seemed to me that the protagonist was hallucinating both the alien abduction and the time slippage.

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

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