Kurt Vonnegut

 Imaginary Interviewer: What book are you tackling next?

Me: Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughter-house Five'.

II: Have you read this before?

Me: Yes, but only once and that was only a few years ago.

II: What did you think?

Me: Vonnegut has a wonderful writing style. A great "voice", if you will. It's easy to read one page and then another and so on. This book is a fairly quick read.

II: What should we know about him?

Me: I'd say that Vonnegut is one of the more 'literary' authors on our list. At least, he's one of the authors that most literary readers would have read. He's a science fiction writer, I guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if most bookstores had him in their general fiction category. Several of his novels were nominated for Hugo awards, including S-5, and he was put into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2015. One of his other books, 'Cat's Cradle' is also on our list.

II: What's 'Slaughter-House Five' about?

Me: At it's heart, the book is about the fire-bombing of Dresden late in World War II. Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden and lived through the ordeal. This part of S-5 is auto-biographical or at least semi-autobiographical. The whole experience was wildly traumatic and this novel is in part his way of working through that trauma. 

II: Is it an anti-war book?

Me: It's listed that way and many people have taken it that way. I think that's a reasonable take but...it's also more complicated than that. The science fiction element of the book casts it all in a strange light and I'm not sure exactly what message to take from it. I can easily say that it isn't a pro-war book, but I think treating it as a binary operation isn't quite right.

II: Do you recommend it?

Me: Yes, very much so.