What a strange book. I honestly have no idea what this really was about... I enjoyed parts of it, other parts however dragged like a bitch soooo... (3.5 stars) 
 Three good things 
 - You have never read a story like this before. It is completely original and different from everthing else 
 - There are passages and writing techniques in this book that you will never forget (e.g. the use of the Phrase "So it goes." after every death that is mentioned in this tale. It is so simple yet memorable and effective because it normalizes the war and thousands of people dying with three simple words.) 
 - Even though this was a strange account of the Second World War, it showed quite clearly the devastating consequences of war and how inevitable a war is when humans are involved What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there wuld still be plain old death. [about writing a book about war] It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say a bout a massacre. 
 Three bad things 
 - this book with its unreliable narrater and 1000 of different layers of plot is quite overwhelming 
 - there are no relatable characters in this piece and it's extremely hard to feel for any of them even though they go through some tough shit 
 - by the end of the book you're probably going to think "what the fuck did I just read" and then move on, the story will only leave an impact on you if you do further and deeper research 
 So what is it about....? 
 That's a really good questions. In the first chapter we are introduced to the author himself, yep Vonnegut talks about that he really had to serve in World War II and that he witnessed and survived the bombing of Dresden. He then proceeds on telling the reader how hard it was to actually write a novel about the war because he forgot a lot and there is still information being withheld by the government. He talks about how he went to visit his war buddy O'Hare to help him remembering the war. O'Hare's wife doesn't like the idea of Vonnegut writing about the war because she fears that he will romanticize it and won't acknowledge that they were basically babies back then. Vonnegut reassures here that he won't do such a thing, dedicates his book to her and names it The Children's Crusade. People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. How fucking perfect was that. I was sooo hooked after the first chapter, I wish the whole book would have been about Vonnegut but nooooo, he had to write about Billy Pilgrim. 
 Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of this tale, the remainder of this tale is about him. Billy Pilgrim served in Germany in the Second World War as well. Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time. (he says) He was abducted by aliens (the Trafalmadorians) who showed him the fourth dimension. (he says) He now knows that every moment is infinite and happens at the same time. (I guess) Therefore Billy Pilgrim can "travel" in time. Basically he is sometimes in the year 1944 with Ronald Weary serving in the war getting imprisoned by the Germans, sometimes in the year 1968 in which he has to face off with his daughter who worries for him because she thinks he's crazy (I mean who can blame her), sometimes with the Tralfamadorians and a hot porn star whom he has impregnated on this foreign planet (yes, yes, totally believable, this totally happened). You cannot help but thinking that Billy is totally crazy OR rather suffers from PTSD. He has no friends. The memories of the war are haunting him and he is trying to cope with it. This whole being unstuck in time seems like a coping mechanism to me. He is jumpy and paranoid. A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting World War Three at any time. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. [...] So, they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help. I really liked how Vonnegut was a distinct character in this novel (he comes up as a soldier whom Billy Pilgrim meets eventually in Dresden) but that as a writer of this piece he was omnipresent in every other characer, as well. There is some Vonnegut in Billy Pilgrim and there is definately some Vonnegut in Kilgore Trout (the writer of the SciFi novels of which Billy is a huge fan of). 
 I also appreciated Vonnegut's criticism of religion and how hypocritical it gets when it comes to tough times (like a war) in which people are senselessly slaughtering one another.The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crufixion, they naturally thought [...]: Oh, Boy-they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: "There are right People to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes. 
 I also really liked how Vonnegut emphasized how unimportant humans and the Earth are in the scope of the Universe as a whole. When Billy visits Tralfamadore he suspects that the humans with their wars must be a pain in the ass to the Universe but the Tralfamadorians just laugh and tell him how little the Earth really means and that the Universe will live on. I liked that he kept things in perspective. 
 This book has many odd and hilarious moments because Billy is so serious in his craziness. He knows a lot about the future, e.g. that he will one day get on an airplane which will crash and he'll be the only surviver. On the way to the hospital his wife will die. He knows that these things must happen (have already happened, man, the Fourth Dimension keeps fucking with my brain) and therefore alters nothing: Billy Pilgrim got onto a chartered airplane in Ilium twenty-five years after that. He knew it was going to crash, but he didn't want to make a fool of himself by saying so. 
 But it were those odd moments and the unbelievably original and weird concept of this book that kept me interested in the story. It is definately one of those books that I have to re-visit when I'm older because I'm sure I wasn't quite ready for it just yet and a lot of references flew over my head. 
 Favorite quotes 
 "How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive." 
 [engraving on a tombstone] EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT