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araym007's review against another edition
5.0
out of nearly 500 books, this is my all-time favorite. read it. end of story.
nadia32's review against another edition
4.0
My first Vonnegut! Again, very easy to read in terms of language and following the plot. Difficult to read at times in terms of the actual events that happen. From a shallower view, the aliens and discussion of PTSD have a lightness and bluntness to them that makes it easy to gloss over what’s happening. But at the same time, you’re very aware that you’re reading about some messed up things. A very unique and uniquely effective anti-war book. I felt like the matter-of-fact nature, with only minor moments of true emotion breaking through, conveyed the message much more effectively than one might expect. Really interesting and really interesting to discuss as well.
nkotek's review against another edition
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
missemg's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.75
sunselenite's review against another edition
dark
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
fbroom's review against another edition
5.0
This is an anti-war book. There is no structure to this book and at first it I thought I was missing something like the connection between all these moments but then I realized at the end that that’s the point of the book, war is supposed to be messy without a structure, meaningless and causes a lot of unnecessary pain.
Billy describes the books on Tralfamadorian saying:
“But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
and I think this is the best description of what the book is.
The author also has a great sense of humor. The descriptions of the books read on Tralfamadorian are hilarious!
Quotes:
"And they’re all grown up now, and I’m an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls. My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there."
"We were United World Federalists back then. I don’t know what we are now. Telephoners, I guess. We telephone a lot—or I do, anyway, late at night."
"And then O’Hare read this: Now what was the grand result of all these struggles? Europe expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of two million of her people; and a handful of quarrelsome knights retained possession of Palestine for about one hundred years!"
"It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds."
"I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. So it goes. Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them."
“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’”
"All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet."
"Only on Earth is there any talk of free will."
"Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out—in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars."
"They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun."
"They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes."
"So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes."
“That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.
"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves."
"Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves."
"The American Army, however, sends its enlisted men out to fight and die in a modified business suit quite evidently made for another man, a sterilized but unpressed gift from a nose-holding charity which passes out clothing to drunks in the slums."
"One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."
“It was about a funeral for a great French chef.” “That sounds interesting.” “All the great chefs in the world are there. It’s a beautiful ceremony.” Trout was making this up as he went along. “Just before the casket is closed, the mourners sprinkle parsley and paprika on the deceased.” So it goes."
"There was only one other patient waiting—an old, old man. The old man was in agony because of gas. He farted tremendously, and then he belched."
"They made Billy get out of the wagon and come look at the horses. When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn’t cried about anything else in the war."
"The name of the book was The Big Board. He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized that he had read it before—years ago, in the veterans’ hospital. It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon"
"She was rich. She was as big as a house because she couldn’t stop eating. She was eating now. She was eating a Three Musketeers"
"It was a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling to do, to associate sex and glamor with war."
“Did that really happen?” said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.
"Lily came in. She had been an a-go-go girl when Rumfoord saw her and resolved to make her his own. She was a high school dropout. Her I.Q. was 103."
Billy describes the books on Tralfamadorian saying:
“But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
and I think this is the best description of what the book is.
The author also has a great sense of humor. The descriptions of the books read on Tralfamadorian are hilarious!
Quotes:
"And they’re all grown up now, and I’m an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls. My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there."
"We were United World Federalists back then. I don’t know what we are now. Telephoners, I guess. We telephone a lot—or I do, anyway, late at night."
"And then O’Hare read this: Now what was the grand result of all these struggles? Europe expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of two million of her people; and a handful of quarrelsome knights retained possession of Palestine for about one hundred years!"
"It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds."
"I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. So it goes. Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them."
“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’”
"All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet."
"Only on Earth is there any talk of free will."
"Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out—in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars."
"They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun."
"They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes."
"So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes."
“That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.
"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves."
"Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves."
"The American Army, however, sends its enlisted men out to fight and die in a modified business suit quite evidently made for another man, a sterilized but unpressed gift from a nose-holding charity which passes out clothing to drunks in the slums."
"One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."
“It was about a funeral for a great French chef.” “That sounds interesting.” “All the great chefs in the world are there. It’s a beautiful ceremony.” Trout was making this up as he went along. “Just before the casket is closed, the mourners sprinkle parsley and paprika on the deceased.” So it goes."
"There was only one other patient waiting—an old, old man. The old man was in agony because of gas. He farted tremendously, and then he belched."
"They made Billy get out of the wagon and come look at the horses. When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn’t cried about anything else in the war."
"The name of the book was The Big Board. He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized that he had read it before—years ago, in the veterans’ hospital. It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon"
"She was rich. She was as big as a house because she couldn’t stop eating. She was eating now. She was eating a Three Musketeers"
"It was a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling to do, to associate sex and glamor with war."
“Did that really happen?” said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.
"Lily came in. She had been an a-go-go girl when Rumfoord saw her and resolved to make her his own. She was a high school dropout. Her I.Q. was 103."
borderhopper's review against another edition
dark
emotional
funny
lighthearted
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
jessshire_cat's review against another edition
1.0
I have no idea how this is rated so highly. My guess is selection bias - only those who click with this book, finish it and review it.
I get there is an autobiographical aspect to it which shouldn't be taken lightly, but I thought it was nonsense. (Yes, I know the nonsense, back and forth in time element is meant to represent PTSD and the absurdity of war, but I thought it was bad.)
I get there is an autobiographical aspect to it which shouldn't be taken lightly, but I thought it was nonsense. (Yes, I know the nonsense, back and forth in time element is meant to represent PTSD and the absurdity of war, but I thought it was bad.)
beefgameplays's review against another edition
1.5
Maybe I just didn't do enough analysis to enjoy this book, but it just felt pointless, irrelevant, and random for most of it. And maybe that’s the point, but it didn't appeal to me. It was mildly entertaining at times, and that was it for me. The humor would work well on someone else, but my sense of humor is not so dry. I also found it incredibly hard to focus on what was going on and when with so much side information being injected into it.
chanelson's review against another edition
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0