Slaughterhouse-five

"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." One of the all-time great opening lines in literature begins what is surely one of the strangest meditations on war. A cult favorite for decades, this mixture of adult historical war novel and science fiction -- all leavened with the blackest of black humor -- is very accessible to teens. For late, great author Kurt Vonnegut, writing this was a kind of therapy. He was present at the Dresden firebombing, and those parts of the novel are based on his own experiences. But it took him a quarter of a century to bring himself to write it (the first chapter is really an Author's Note about how he finally came to do so), and he approaches that traumatic event gingerly, circling around it, holding it at a distance with humor and a matter-of-fact tone that fails to cover the pain.

Billy is one of those lucky literary doofuses -- like Huck Finn, Chauncey Gardiner, and Forrest Gump. He zings back and forth through his life with enough spacey cluelessness that even finding himself on another planet barely fazes him. Or perhaps it isn't cluelessness but a sort of Tralfamadorian Zen acceptance of each moment. Whichever, it makes him an appealing blank through whom the reader, and the author, can look at some of the horrendous things that human beings do to one another.