Slaughterhouse Five - Seth Gerry

The book "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut is a short novel about a soldier by the name of billy pilgrim and his trauma from being a soldier during ww2. It caused him to do many things, and being one of the few survivors from the dresden bombing doesn't help. He goes through many experiences, one of them being abducted by aliens called tralfamadorians and learning that time isn't sequential - it is a unit of measurement that us as humans use to deal with our lives. When he learns this, he realizes that its all true. He goes through flashbacks of the war, remembering how he somehow lived, the conditions that he and many other soldiers went through. He remembered the looks of the jewish inmates, all of which just seemed to not care anymore. They all had blank expressions, no feelings or faith in humanity. He remembers the soldiers who made his life turn into complete hell. He jumps back to his current life, as a dentist. Changed by the horrors and sorrow he saw in Germany, he is not himself. He remembers all that has happened, from the capture in Germany to all of the deaths he saw, which by now he's learned to cope with and says "so it goes."

     This book contains 215 pages of sad and disturbing pages, all connected by the tale of billy pilgrim. The book itself is quite small, but this is not an easy book to read. It would make you realize that the world we lived in then is completely different from the world we live in now. Nearly every page has somebody dying on it, which is why you might want to know how to cope with death because if you got into the book as much as i did, you'd have to know how to cope with death. It is not an easy read, so if you have troubles reading stories that start off slow then don't even bother looking at it. But, if you can read well then i highly suggest reading this book. It is very good once you get the idea of it being so sporadic, and will draw you in with every page after the first half chapter.