Sure, Slaughterhouse-Five is a fun read. It's quirky, strange, exciting, new, and sure to get your students engaged in the reading process. But it's also a tough read, what with its horrific violence, confusing structure, and relentless look at hot-button issues that just may get some of your students' voices raised. But the things that make this novel tricky to teach are also what make it worthwhile, because you're sure to inspire all kinds of exciting discussions and debates among your students.

Students might find the novel's non-chronological form to be confusing, and they might have trouble sussing out whether he's actually time traveling or it's all in his head. But throughout the novel, Billy Pilgrim is a remarkably self-conscious narrator, and this is a remarkably self-conscious book. That means it gives you a great opportunity to make tough topics like postmodernism and metafiction accessible to your students as a way of explaining and understanding the novel's strange structure.