Slaughterhouse Five

[King Bob]

I have had a copy of this for years, sitting unread. I last read it in my early twenties I think and could remember very little of it.

Rereading it, I found that it's just not that good. The story is thin and doesn't really go anywhere, the prose is really choppy, and when he throws out an ironic or tragic incident, he follows it with "So it goes." - which got really annoying fast. I think it's a book for someone much younger than me.

On the other hand, it is where a lot of people (including me) found out about the bombing of Dresden, so it has some historical importance, but the bombing is covered better in an essay in his collection Armageddon in Retrospect which uses some of the same phrases as this novel.

[Drunk Monk]

Interesting.  I've been meaning to re-read that myself because I quote the 'unstuck in time' line a lot.  It's a pitfall of being a publisher, exacerbated by our recent shift to quarterly.  For example, I just closed SPRING 2019 and am starting to work on SUMMER 2019.  In January.  WTH?  

Maybe the movie has forever tainted my perception of the book.  I read the book after seeing the movie - shoot I don't even know when that was... the 80s sometime?  That's when I was doing the most reading of 'classics'.

[King Bob]

I recently decided to reread this because I read a couple of pieces saying it's about PTSD. My reaction this time was much different. After a long non-fiction intro where he talks some about his wartime experiences, chapter 1 starts with telling us Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time. Vonnegut elaborates for a paragraph and then add, "He says." So he undermines that narrative right from the beginning. He uses an omniscient narrator, but in some WWII episodes, he will interrupt his narration to say "I was there too." And again and again, usually after something tragic, he will say "So it goes." That bothered me last time, but this time I felt like he was making the point that tragedy happens to everyone, and is constantly happening. So it's sort of like his first noble truth. I also noticed that he brings in at least two characters from his other novels, and one phrase right out of Slapstick. It felt like I was becoming unstuck in literature, and the novels were bleeding together.

In all I liked it much better this time, although I doubt I'll read it again. But I'm not sold on the PTSD idea. Maybe you have to experience that to see it.

[cranefly]

My best friend and I saw the movie version in a theater when it first came out.  We got there twenty minutes late.  Then we stayed for the next showing through what we missed.  Afterwards we joked that it didn't much matter when you enter the movie.

Never read the book.

[Drunk Monk]

Afterwards we joked that it didn't much matter when you enter the movie.

Same thing is true about the original Planet of the Apes film franchise. You can start with any film and it works. I think all good time travel plots should be so...