As a literary device, this was a way for Vonnegut to “impress upon readers that we keep making the same mistake and it doesn’t have to be that way,” says Julia Whitehead, the executive director of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.

Somehow, though, we find ourselves repeatedly in the same predicaments. Since it was published, Slaughterhouse-Five has been banned or challenged on at least 18 occasions. And the rhetoric around each case appears to be, like Billy Pilgrim, “unstuck in time.” When the book was stricken from the public schools of Oakland County, Michigan in 1972, the circuit judge called it “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” In 1973 the Drake Public School Board in North Dakota set 32 copies aflame in the high school’s coal burner. A few years later, the Island Trees school district of Levittown, New York—in an area once known as Jerusalem—removed Slaughterhouse-Five and 8 other books from its high school and junior high libraries. Board members called the books “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.” In the 1982 Board of Education v. Pico trial, the U.S. Supreme court ruled 5-4 against the board's restriction, citing a violation of the First Amendment. But even as that case was being decided, more districts continued to face challenges to the novel’s place in schools.

So there was a familiar ring to things when a man named Wesley Scroggins in Republic, Missouri offered his views in the Springfield News-Leader last fall. An associate professor at Missouri State University who home-schools his own children, Scroggins warned against certain books taught in the district. “It is time parents and taxpayers in this school district are informed about this material,” he wrote. But not the 1,164 students of Republic High.

“This is a book that contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame,” he wrote of Slaughterhouse-Five. “The ‘f word’ is plastered on almost every other page. The content ranges from naked men and women in cages together so that others can watch them having sex to God telling people that they better not mess with his loser, bum of a son, named Jesus Christ.”

A reader might be excused surprise that the subject of book-banning is raised at all these days, let alone for a novel so well-worn. Whitehead was among the bewildered. But Slaughterhouse-Five ranks No. 29 on the American Library Association’s list of banned or challenged classics. Last year, the ALA tallied 348 challenges to books, which is a fraction of the cases left unreported, says Barbara Jones , director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. Topping the full list over the past decade is the Harry Potter series. Toni Morrison and Judy Blume make multiple appearances. For those looking to commemorate these statistics, the annual Banned Books Week is coming up September 24 through October 1.