I read Vonnegut's "Slaugtherhouse Five" on the plane. Maybe I had low
expectations and you guys are probably bored of him because he is part
of the established canon but I can say that I enjoyed the book. SH-5
is Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity Rainbow", Joseph Heller and even a bit of
Saul Bellow (with his midlife fantasies of bedding beautiful women)
all rolled into one and retold with the gravitas of actual witness of
the events. The book is a bit apolitical (which would be a turnoff for
you) and the starving russian prisoners are treated as part of the
landscape. But unlike Pynchon's many-leveled and contrived craziness,
Vonnegut's schizophrenic retelling of the firebombing of Dresden is
actually quite fitting.