Both sorrowful and funny, Slaughterhouse-Five is the book that pushed Vonnegut to national prominence after years of middling success as a sort-of-sci-fi-sort-of-political-sort-of-philosophically-humorous writer. It's remains pretty incredible it happened because it's not as though Slaughterhouse abandoned Vonnegut's genre-defying style. The novel is about the lifelong impact WWII had on the young men—read: teenagers; read: children—sent to fight in it. Told through flashbacks our cowardly protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is having as he becomes unstuck in time (a side-effect, you see, from his time being abducted by aliens from Tralfamador and put in an alien zoo where he was paired with a famous Hollywood actress as a mate) and travels back and forth through the events of his life. You know, a classic WWII novel format. Billy relives his capture by the Germans and his time as a POW during the bombing of Dresden. Oh, Vonnegut himself is also in the novel, both as its narrator and author and as one of Billy's fellow POWs with a sever case of the runs.

And it's amazing.

Any downside? Things I should be aware of? There's some incorrect info in the novel about the death toll from the bombing of Dresden that places it higher than the death toll at Hiroshima. Not Vonnegut's fault, he was working with the numbers reported at the time. So don't go around quoting figures from this in your discussions of war casualties, but otherwise you're good to go.

Worth my time? 100%. Vonnegut is truly unique and this is the "if you're only going to read one, read this one" from his oeuvre. It's short, engaging, accessible to the average reader and— at the risk of sounding like some overly enthusiastic high school English teacher— important.