10 best Kurt Vonnegut books, ranked

And so it goes… and goes and goes until it reaches the vaulted halls of literary greats! Such was the career of that titan of tragicomedy Kurt Vonnegut. One of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century, these are the ten of his best books.

10. Galapagos

Galapagos is a wild one, like the island for which it is named. You know, where Darwin watched all those finches? Vonnegut plays around with the ideas of evolution in this book to the extreme, as the plot covers 1,000,000 years of humans doing just that. The action is narrated by a ghost from the radical 1980’s, who, like us, is baffled by what they behold. The lesson? Big brain equals bad results.

9. Jailbird

Walter F. Starbuck, named for the Moby Dick character and not the coffee chain, was a minor player in the Watergate Scandal which led to the political downfall of President Richard Nixon. At least, that’s how Vonnegut styles him. A comical takedown of corporate America and the dreams it crushes, it’s a scathing and oddly prescient look at a world were capitalism is left to run wild.

8. The Sirens of Titan

The Sirens of Titan explores one of Vonnegut’s favorite ideas: extraterrestrial life meddling in the lives of humans. In this case, it’s not just one poor World War II veteran, it’s every single human. Space explorer Malachi Constant discovers on a mission to Titan that the evolution of the human race has been manipulated by aliens. What does it all mean? Existential questions abound.

7. Hocus Pocus

Sadly, this is not the book upon which the iconic Halloween kids movie was based. Hocus Pocus is the story of Eugene Debs Hartke, a Vietnam War veteran accused of helping inmates escape from a maximum security prison. He attempts to recount the tale as best as his fractured mind can allow. Despite being not all there, he still renders us with banger quotes such as “and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

6. Bluebeard

Bluebeard is the story of the painter Rabo Karabekian. Never heard of him? He would have been as famous of Jackson Pollock, but he painted all his masterworks with house paint that peeled away and left him with nothing. In this novel, Karabekian jealously guards a certain painting locked in his barn. To protect it from what? The elements? The art world? Society at large? All of the above.

5. Timequake

Timequake is a story about a titular natural disaster (or blessing, depending on how you look at it) where everything and everyone in the universe jumps back 10 years in time, fully aware of how they spent those 10 years. It’s a meditation on the past and whether or not, given the chance, any of us would truly change our old decisions. The devil you know!

4. Mother Night

Mother Night is one of Vonnegut’s most celebrated. It’s the story of Howard W. Campbell, a man who spent World War II working as both a Nazi propagandist and a spy for the United States government. It’s a story about identity, extremism, and the idea that we indeed are who we pretend to be. Thorny moral questions abound.

3. Cat’s Cradle

Cat’s Cradle is the story of Jonah (or John, depending who you ask) who, after doing a little digging about the creation of the atomic bomb, discovers the existence of a substance called ice-9. Ice-9 turns any water it comes into contact with into ice instantly, meaning that if it were drop into the ocean… life on Earth would end. It’s a book about how humanity is indeed the architect of its own destruction, and the whacky ways in which it attempts to shift the blame.

2. Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions is the story of struggling author Kilgore Trout (inspired by the real life author Theodore Sturgeon) who writes a sci-fi book that an unsuspecting businessman mistakes for the truth. What makes it one of the best of Vonnegut’s work? It takes a sledgehammer to the fourth wall, becoming a confessional about what the author actually thinks about his own work.

1. Slaughterhouse Five

Slaughterhouse Five was inspired, or rather, haunted by Vonnegut’s real life experience living through the Allied fire bombing of civilians in the German city of Dresden during World War II. America soldier Billy Pilgrim survives the fiery destruction of 250,000 souls and afterward becomes “unstuck in time” by a species of meddling extraterrestrials, causing him to live the experiences of his life over and over again. Riotously funny, and witheringly terrifying, it’s the best work Vonnegut has to offer.