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Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut #inbeetweeny

I was inspired to read this by reading over the shoulder of someone on a sun lounger last, last summer. It was about World War 2, was considered a classic and was very slim (bonus) so I jetted home and ordered it from Amazon only for it to gather dust in my endless pile of books to be read.

Much reorganising of the book shelf later meant that Slaughterhouse 5 was suddenly next on my list and I picked it up with glee.

It's funny how sometimes you can breeze through 900 and odd pages (well not quite breeze but something up there with wind related progress) yet sometimes you can struggle through a mere 177. Vanity Fair was the former, Slaughterhouse 5 was the latter. In fact if it hadn't been only 177 pages I think I would have considered whether to give it up as part of my recent change of heart when it comes to reading 'the book, the whole book and nothing but the book' (see my post 'to read or not to read' ).


Time travel and aliens is a lot to contend with in any event but the timeline was so difficult to follow and really detracted from the main war story, that was often horrific. The book should have been a science fiction work or a war story as it failed (over only 177 pages) to be both. At times it felt like the very excellent The Time Traveler's Wife but it didn't have the overreaching plot narrative that made TTTW so good (and heart breaking), and it wasn't clever enough. The narrator introduced the book as a story about the devastating Dresden Bombing yet 100 pages in the bombing had not yet taken place, although the main character had been abducted by aliens and was being displayed in a zoo as a tourist attraction. Was it Post Traumatic Stress? Dementia? If it was either it wasn't fully explored or explained enough to the reader.

I whisper it quietly but I do often find classics disappointing (For Whom The Bell Tolls for example) and wonder why they obtained their cult status. Maybe it is one for the classroom? I did spend sometime reading in to the book once I had finished it to see if any further light was shed but alas I remained unilluminated.

The best thing about this book was the fact I got to leave it on a Western Ferry as a #PassItOn book, which is a first for pass it on!

P.S If I read the phrase 'so it goes' one more time I will scream!

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