13. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut

This is a brilliant book. I'm getting suspicious about all these amazing books I'm reading. Perhaps they're not and I simply have no taste, or suffer from some literary affliction akin to memory confabulation.

Regardless - this book seethes with wit and ardour and hopelessly incisive humour.

I would like to quote the highlights, but it'd be like showing the highlights of world record breaking 100m sprint. I'd have to show the whole thing.

Here's a small tasting plate though:

'Did that really happen? said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn't even had one baby yet. She used birth control.

'Of course it happened,' Trout told her. 'If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud.'

Maggie believed him. 'I'd never thought about that before.'

'Think about it now'.

Or

Billy told her what had happened to the buildings that used to form cliffs around the stockyards. They had collapsed. Their wood had been consumed, and their stones had crashed down, had tumbled against one another until they locked at last in low and graceful curves.

'It was like the moon', said Billy Pilgrim.

Or

Listen - on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy's boxcar door, and the door was opened. Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner-brace, self-crucified, holding himself there with a blue and ivory claw hooked over the sill of the ventilator. Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction.

This can be useful in rocketry.

Or

Billy left his room, went down the slow elevator, walked over to Times Square, looked into the window of a tawdry bookstore. In the window were hundreds of books about fucking and buggery and murder, and a street guide to New York City, and a model of the Statue of Liberty with a thermometer on it. Also in the window, speckled with soot and fly shit, were four paperback novels by Billy's friend, Kilgore Trout.

The news of the day, meanwhile, was being written in a ribbon of lights on a building to Billy's back. The window reflected the news. It was about power and sports and anger and death. So it goes.

Billy went into the bookstore.

Very stylish. Maybe too clever or preachy? Anyway, everyone should read this. Takes less than a day.