Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt

I've finally read Vonnegut.


Slowly, but surely, I've been filling in the holes of my reading history. I figured I would start my Vonnegut education with Slaughterhouse-Five - the tale of a man who fought in WWII and went on to have a family and a business, and - oh yeah - an alien abduction.

In my mind:
Catch-22 + On the Road = Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse has the ironic critique of war of Catch-22 and the scattered ramblings of On the Road.

It took me 150 to start to get settled into the book and actually like it. But after that? I was kind of on board. I was like: yeah, the way we think of time as linear only is silly. We are doing everything all the time. All memories are one. Trippy, man.

Then I realized I wasn't on drugs and got back to my normal self.

I ended up enjoying the book. By the end I didn't mind that the plot of the book was NOT linear because Vonnegut took the reader on a twisty-turn-y journey through this man's life. And I liked the way Vonnegut dealt with the gruesome terror of war - stating horror straightforwardly without a huge amount of emotionally charged adjective description.

And his headstone? "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." Ironic perfection.

"As an Earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said - and calendars."
Vonnegut