2016 Reading challenge: A book you should have read in school

This is the first challenge that I kind of had to interpret loosely.  I was a pretty great student who read almost every book she was supposed to (except for textbooks in college).  There was one book in my Greek mythology class that I kind of skipped over, but I can't remember the name of it or what it was about, so I have no way of finding it again.  I also gave up on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in high school - it was not at all what I expected and I literally couldn't read more than two paragraphs without falling asleep, even when I got well into the Rising Action.  Plus it was the end of my senior year and I'd already been accepted to college, and bombing one unit in English class wasn't going to lower my GPA so drastically that I'd lose my spot at MSU.  So sue me.

Anyway, I decided to interpret this challenge as a book I feel should have been a part of my curriculum in school.  And so I chose the book that my eleventh grade English teacher talked about almost more than some of the books that we actually read: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.  Junior year honors English focused heavily on existentialism, a theory (religion? lack thereof?) that I never really understood.  We read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle that year, and I remember Mr. Duffy frequently talking about Slaughterhouse Five as well.  He also talked about Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita a lot, but I'll get to that later. :)

I've sort of been meaning to read Slaughterhouse Five for all of these years, but never really had a reason to until this challenge.  The moment I saw this particular challenge I knew that I was going to read it.  To paraphrase Vonnegut, me reading this book was meant to be, and it always was and it always will be.

So, it took me less than a week to read Slaughterhouse Five.  I can't even remember the last time I read a book that quickly!  (Okay, it was probably two summers ago when I re-read Harry Potter, because the first three books are so short.)  The quick pace of this book was a huge breath of fresh air after crawling my way through The Fellowship of the Ring.  Vonnegut's short, easy sentences were so easy to get through that I occasionally caught myself wondering why he didn't combine a few of those sentences.

Overall, I liked it.  I've always enjoyed satire.  I even noticed a few bits of symbolism in this book, which is rare.  I don't really know what they mean, but I noticed them.  The train that Billy Pilgrim and the other prisoners of war were transported in was marked with orange and black, to denote that it was not to be bombed.  The tents at Billy Pilgrim's daughter's wedding were also orange and black.  I noticed that, said "huh, that must mean something," and then kept reading because interpreting symbolism has never been one of my strong suits.  (I struggled very hard in all four years of honors/AP English.  I think the only reasons I managed to earn good grades were a) my teachers could tell that I was honestly trying and b) I had an English major for a mother who helped me to write my papers.)

The whole Tralfamadore thing and their view on time was at once interesting and obnoxious.  After their first introduction, I was like, "wow, they seem to be able to handle death in a very cool way, I wish I could see it like that," and I kind of liked their tradition of saying "So it goes" whenever they learned of a death.  But the more I read about the Tralfamadorians, the more Billy Pilgrim learned about them, the more I was kinda like "they sound really pretentious."  And the more the narrator said "So it goes" every time death was mentioned, even so much as "they were going to discuss whether the novel was dead or not" (p 205), the more it got annoying.  The sentence feels like you're distancing yourself from the death, shrugging it off and basically saying, "whatever."  Of course, I understand why Vonnegut uses the phrase that way.  This book is a satire of war, or more precisely a satire of American films/books/TV shows that glorify war.  This book is criticizing people who look at war as a big, beautiful thing fought by strong, valiant 35-year-olds and say, "Well, the millions of deaths were necessary and not that bad when you consider the alternative to fighting."  (Just gotta point out that I don't know how well I would have picked up on that if it wasn't literally spelled out for us on pages 14-15.)

As usual, there were a few quotes in this book that really resonated with me, and I'd like to share them now.

"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep" (p 18).  The narrator says this after talking about visiting the World's Fair and seeing what the past was like and what the future might be like.  (I wish I could have seen a World's Fair!)  I just really liked that quote.  How big is a moment?  Can we hold on to a moment forever?  Do we get to keep moments that were once the present with us as they become the past?  Deep stuff.

"It isn't much fun if you have to pinch every penny till it screams" (p 104), spoken by Billy Pilgrim's mother.  All I have to say about that one is: Amen sista, I hear you on that.

So, yeah, certain aspects of the book got a little annoying at times but overall, I really liked it.  I wish I'd stayed in touch with Mr. Duffy so I could tell him that I finally read it!

Interjection: has anybody noticed how my writing style in each blog post is influenced by the book that I've been reading?  I've always struggled to find my own voice when writing.  I also struggle to find my own voice when singing - I tend to try to copy every sound, every fluctuation of the singer whether I'm listening to The Beatles or Regina Spektor. 

When I checked Slaughterhouse Five out from the library, I also snagged three other books.  Two of them are definitely for the 2016 challenge, while I still have to decide if the third one is or not.  So I'm not entirely sure which one I'll read first, but I'll definitely be getting started on my next book and challenge soon oh boy!

And uh.  A book published this year?  You KNOW I'm gonna go with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which releases in 44 days AHHHHHH!  I'm so stoked for my first Potter-related midnight release in five years!!