"Slaughterhouse Five"

Kurt Vonnegut's satirical anti-war novel is somehow hilarious and depressing at the same time. I read it in about two days and wished it would have lasted longer. Billy, the main character, is a POW in WWII who survives the Dresden bombing and recounts the atrocities he witnesses during the war with a light wit and straight-forward manner. Billy also inadvertently time travels, living and re-living events in the future and past out of sequence, describing his mundane future marriage, a plane crash he already knows he's going to be in, and time spent as a captive on an alien planet. (It doesn't read as crazy as it sounds).
     His time travel and the aliens' comments on the manner of humans raises existential questions in a very approachable way, that makes you think but isn't so complicated that it loses its entertainment value. This book has gotten ton of literary praise, and for good reason. It's considered an American classic, and has been called "the best book written in the 20th century." It might have also earned a place in my top 10 favorite books.

"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and not much else

Seth Grahame-Smith had the ingenious idea of combining a classic victorian novel with a science-fiction monster. A lot of people have asked me about this book and I hadn't read it, so I decided I should. But reading it was more tedious than trying to read the original "Pride and Prejudice." The ONLY thing this book has going for it is the novelty of throwing zombies into an austere Jane Austen novel. Zombie attacks are conducive to rich descriptions, vivid details, and intense action, but this book completely lacks all of those. The characters are unappealing and static, the plot is just as boring as it has always been. Reading it felt like a chore. Each zombie attack depicted (and there were a lot) all went like this: "The zombies grabbed their victims and started eating them." The next chapter, "The zombies grabbed their victims and started eating them." Each scene was shallow and lifeless (no pun intended).
     The author didn't exactly do a great job of blending the zombie motif in with the original novel, either. There are very odd asides that describe the Bennet girls' intense training in the Far East that lead them to become top zombie warriors. What? Poorly woven into the original plot and language, it just seems jarring and ridiculous. I couldn't get invested in the story at all, and I'm having trouble understanding how this book managed to become so popular.