I love this book! Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is one of my favorite books of all time. It is both genius and important.
It is brilliantly written. Vonnegut is a master, distorting the format and genre of the novel into something baroque and complex while charismatically keeping the experience light and readable. Although you can tell the author is a bit curmudgeonly, it is his outstanding sense of humanity that raises this book from casual entertainment to a profound and important focal point for the introspection of our entire species.
This quote in particular filled me with hope:
"I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."