Rating: 
Summary: Even better the second time through.
Review: I read this book when it first came out, and believed it to be a wonderful commentary on war and human nature. I just reread it for a book club and found it much better the second time around. It is simple in its narrative, yet complex in its commentary. And so it goes.
Rating:
Summary: A triumphant subversion to run-of-the-mill WWII novels.
Review: In the genre of WWII novels, the literary world has been doomed to romantic tales of our heroes fighting the Nazis. Not Vonnegut! While challenging our convictions with tempting and subversive viewpoints, Vonnegut allows us to look inside of ourselves and each other through the mind of Billy Pilgrim. While the science fiction and lack of defined plot may be dreaded by literary traditionalists, Slaughter House V is a respectable necessity that everyone should read. A Catcher in the Rye search for ourselves in a world full of daunting and overtly oppressive realities. Congrats, Mr. Vonnegut!
Rating:
Summary: Simply Intoxicating
Review: Finally, abook that actually deserves five stars. I literally couldn't put it down. It is my frist Vonnegut and will definitely not be my last. It isn't the least bit confusing and goes by almost efforlessly. Totally enteraining.
Rating:
Summary: Exquisitely fictional from birth to death. So it goes.
Review: This is my favorite Vonnegut novel, even after Breakfast of Champions and Galapagos, because it is the simplest way to sum up the whole of any person's life. If one reads it for the fun and tragedy of the book, or if he reads it for the in depth struggle of a personal war, he reads it and enjoys.
Rating: 
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: In buying this book I expected to read about the firebombing of Dresden, and instead got an alternative view of war and its impact on people. The storytelling by Vonnegut was rather sporadic and unorthodox, and was not at all what I had expected to read. But once I had started, I could not put the book down. It is one of the better books which I have read, but not the best.
Rating:
Summary: An exquisite amalgam of ideas and experiences
Review: Opening with a confusing self-referential chapter more poetry than prose, Vonnegut sets the stage marvelously for what is to come. The point is driven soundly home that our experiences are always with us and are a part of us. It is to us to choose which will define us.Indeed, in this war book, there are no parts available for John Wayne. A wonderful rebuttal to those who say that great literature must be difficult to read.
Rating:
Summary: The Cultural Anti Anti-War Commentary of Vonngut
Review: Vonnegut is by far one of the finest novelists of the twentieth century. (In fact, my favorite...) The story is not, however, the anti-war icon which people make it to be! Billy Pilgrim is the latter twentieth century adaptation of Willie Loman (Our Town). His distorted conciousness is not solely representative of his tragic war experiences; they could have been created by any number of negative contemporary cultural influences. It just so happens that Billy Pilgrim's "dementia" is a result of war. This novel is more a commentary on contemporary cultural pressures and failures, than on war itself. The key to understanding this concept is looking past Vonnegut's simplistic style and finding truth in larger themes, rather than the specific language of the text.
Rating:
Summary: strange, harrowing, disjointed, funny at times, ironic
Review: Vonnegut really created a strange yet terrific novel. Billy Pilgrim's war memories and alien-abduction memories make the book worth reading. Through Pilgrim we see some of the horrors of war, and also the idealistic utopia on Tralfamadore. Vonnegut's disjointed, probably-drug-induced novel has a fantastic effect upon finishing it. One of the best books I've ever read, I would recommend it to all.
Rating:
Summary: what is all the fuss?
Review: I don't understand why people have fallen all over themselves to praise this book. As one reader suggested, it's not the sort of book you can enjoy sheerly for entertainment. I found Vonnegut's prose style very difficult to penetrate , and the constantly shifting point of view was jarring, although the sardonic tone of the novel was often humourous. Unfortunately, I've been more gripped by stories of war (various war movies/documentaries), laughed louder at an author's tongue-in-cheek view of society (Tom Robbines, Julian Barnes), and read novels where shifing points of view help to illustrate and illuminate the story (Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Joseph Heller's Catch-22). But I can't deny that beyond these criticisms and what I can't deny to be some frustrations when reading this book, it was above all, a good read. . I just don't think it's deserving of the "classic" status that seems to be attributed to it by many readers.
Rating:
Summary: One of the two best books I ever read!
Review: The other being One Hundred Years Of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This book by Vonnegut is simply stunning - humanist, melancholy, funny; an alien's-eye view of humanity induced by his traumas during WW2. I first read it when I was 15 and it blew me away then - I've since re-read it every couple of years and my admiration for it only grows over time. Contains some amazing writing: the Tralfamadorians, who see the sky as 'luminous spaghetti', scouts lumbering into a wood 'like the large, clumsy mammals that they were'... I think Vonnegut has gone off the boil in recent years but all his early books are worth reading, and for my money this is the best of them. Everybody should read it.
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