Slaughterhouse Five

Tonight I finished a novel by Kurt Vonnegut called Slaughterhouse Five. It was published in 1969 and is a semiautobiographical recollection of the bombing of Dresden by Allied planes spewing jellied gasoline that had been lit on fire. The is happened as a result of World War Two.

Kurt Vonnegut is my favourite author. Here is a list of books by him that I have:

Player Piano (1952)
Cat’s Cradle (1963)
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine (1965)
Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade (1969)
Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday (1973)
Bluebeard (1987)
Hocus Pocus (1990)
Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (1999)
A Man Without a Country (2005)
Armageddon in Retrospect (2008, posthumous)

Usually, people are introduced to Vonnegut through Slaughterhouse Five, which is taught in some high schools and in most tertiary English Literature courses. But not me. I read nine others first. Beginning with my favourite: Breakfast of Champions. Which I have read three times already. And am considering reading again this weekend.

Vonnegut is classified by most people as a science fiction writer, but his stories are so much more than that. They are often poignant social commentaries which brutally denounce those in power who by some unusual coincidence, always seem to make foolish decisions. Kurt Vonnegut is more than 50% responsible for my global worldview. Everyone should read at least one of his books before they die. Reading a Vonnegut novel should be on every bucket list of every Westerner.

Kurt is dead now. He died (according to wikipedia) of a fall at his New York apartment resulting in irreversible brain injuries. So it goes. 

I would imagine his epitaph would read: