Slaughterhouse Five, By Kurt Vonnegut

     My outside reading book is Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. One of my favorite things about this book is the dry, dark sense of humor. For example, whenever Vonnegut mentions death, he ends the section with the phrase "...so it goes." The effect is something like "'You stake a guy out an anthill in the desert-see? He's facing upward, and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelidsso he has to stare at the sun till he dies.' So it goes." (37). The author always finishes descriptions of death and destruction by saying hey, that's just how it works. This ties in to the beginning of the book when Vonnegut is describing how he wrote the book, and he is talking to a friend about the book "'Is it an anti-war book?' 'Yes,' I said...'You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?' 'No. What do you say?...' 'I say why don't you write and anti-glacier book instead?'" Again, Vonnegut is saying that war is a horrible, yet unavoidable part of life. The sad thing is that while glaciers are disappearing, war has been here for as long as humans have, and isn't going anywhere.