emma's Reviews > Slaughterhouse-Five

welcome to...SEPTEMBERHOUSE-FIVE.

it's another title + month based pun, it's another classic on my currently reading list, it's another PROJECT LONG CLASSIC installment, a project by which i take on classics i've been procrastinating reading in itty bitty sections to make them seem manageable.

this one isn't long, but i did only add it to my want to read list because i somehow have a bookmark that says "everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" and i feel like a poseur.

so similar in impact.

let's get into it.


CHAPTER 1
i think this book has like 10 chapters, so i'll just read one a day till it's done and call it the world's worst project selection in terms of accuracy.

to be honest i just want an excuse to read it immediately.


CHAPTER 2
"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

i mean. holy moley.


CHAPTER 3
this book has a character who briefly appears and in his short time with us says that if you're writing an anti-war book, you may as well write an anti-glacier book for how effective it will be. both war and glaciers are here intended as timeless and permanent parts of human life.

with climate change now making glaciers a much more impeachable concept, this statement acts as one of strange and ironic and twisted hope.


CHAPTER 4
"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

if i have to get abducted by aliens i hope they're also wise.


CHAPTER 5
it's always fun to see another book you've enjoyed or want to read mentioned in a book you're actively reading and enjoying. like a special guest star appearance.


CHAPTER 6
do you know the meme where a book / movie / tv show / romping good time / limited series / human life has to end when they say the title?

anyway. this book would've just ended.


CHAPTER 7
one of those books where you're like "i could write a whole paper about this" every other page.


CHAPTER 8
this book is somewhat unique in antiwar books for its admission that war is intended to make shells out of heroic people, and that "one of its effects" is to prevent people from being "characters."

it seems there is an impulse to think antiwar media will be more effective if this truth is ignored, but i've never found that to be the case. the most disturbing part of war, after all, is its anti-humanity.


CHAPTER 9
a while back my boyfriend was flipping through my copy of this book and laughed pretty hard, but i didn't ask why because he appeared to be fairly close to the end and i didn't want to be spoiled.

i have to say, i gave him more literary benefit of the doubt than he was entitled to for laughing at what i now realize was a drawing of boobs.


CHAPTER 10
welp.


OVERALL
this book was mind melting and funny and smart and touching and painful, as was realizing that the quote i love so much that it inspired me to read this book is not meant sincerely.

not everything is beautiful. a hell of a lot hurts. we shouldn't respond to death with nonchalance—we should never accept that that's how it has to go, not all of the time, not right then. war is evil, and things mean things, and we should keep life close to us even when it's tempting to release it, to pull your hand back as if from a hot stove.

and the hurting makes the beautiful more beautiful anyway.
rating: 5