My first time reading this, or any Vonnegut, and I had literally no idea what it was about before starting. I didn't get assigned books written after the 1950s in high school so I missed this classic. Although I din't usually like books with this type of story structure, I was interested and curious as I read through it.

The most interesting concept in the book is time. Billy Pilgrim, the main character, learns to time travel after being abducted by aliens and he experiences vignettes of his life out of their chronological order. These aliens, when they look at a human, do not see a being on two legs; they see a centepede with millions of legs that show all the moments of a person's life strung together. Billy's attitude towards the death happening continuously all around him is blasé ("So it goes.") because death is just one moment in a person's life--they are eternally alive in all the other moments.

Another thing Billy learns to do is experience events in reverse. There is a wonderful vignette where the bombing of Dresden is described this way, starting with planes sucking up all the destruction and putting it into metal canisters, where they are given to women in factories who then safely store the components deep in the ground. It's beautiful to imagine the world in this direction, heading towards goodness and healing instead of destruction.