Slaughterhouse-Five | Hacker News Reader

Slaughterhouse-Five

hn-books.com

Time changes everything. That certainly goes for the way you feel about the books you've read. It also changes the way you feel about books that you've always wanted to read and are just now getting around to reading.

I like and agree with your review. Remember when the book was written it was a much more naive time, not just for us, but for the world as well. We were still practicing for the Russian invasion.

How can you not love a character named Kilgore Trout? Mr. Vonnegut was nothing if not "trip-y".

I always try to appreciate the context of the times when a story was written. Learning a little more of the external context within which a story was written can, at times, enhance the understanding of the story.

This might be a story that lends itself to that. Maybe. I read this book in high school and thought it was ok then, but I didn't really understand why the people I knew who read it thought it was so great. I didn't do any research about the era this was written in though, so I don't really know if it'd help or not.

It certainly is trippy though and an entertaining read in the least.

One thing I love about Vonnegut is that certain kinds of naivete retain their wisdom long after the sophisticated opinions of the day have changed.

The point of the book isn't so much to argue against war in general as to argue against the idea that war is inevitable.

The idea that war and specific acts of war are unavoidable parts of the human condition is supposed to seem as insane and pathetic as the protagonist's passive view of his life, a view that comes from his beliefs about time travel.

Is it just me or is the text on that page very difficult to read?

No, but in Safari I'm seeing the content column below the sidebar column.

Same here... I'm using Safari 5.0.4

Looks okay to me in Chrome, FF, and IE.

Anything in particular that makes it hard to read?

Viewing it with FF4 and it looks squashed http://i.imgur.com/r5TiZ.jpg

I can't replicate that in FF4 on Linux, even by zooming out. Text remains legible at all sizes up to the point where it's simply too small to see through the pixelization. The computed font shows as '"Liberation Sans",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif'; perhaps you've got a bad render on one of those?

Could be, it doesn't become really legible until I have zoomed up several times. This is FF4 running on Win7.

I have the same setup, and can't duplicate the issue.

Thanks bmj, clearly something to do with my setup then

FF4 with hardware acceleration enabled has absolutely horrific font rendering; have you tried disabling it?

>"it seemed a bit trite."

And so it goes.

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