a great concept ruined by my overly-pedantic aversion to the blatantly false numbers of the casualties of the dresden bombing that it keeps reporting as well as my absolute repulsive horror at the idea of david irving of all people—a noted holocaust denier!!!!—being cited here as some sort of person worthy of being given the epithet of historian.

listen, i know this is an anti-war book and that it is, in many ways, a processing of the traumas of war. the way billy pilgrim gets unstuck in time is symptomatic of the derealisation and depersonalisation that trauma victims often go through, and i'm very impressed at the way vonnegut shows it on prose but... well—

must i really have to go through recountings of nazi-inflated numbers to experience this?