52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
60. The things they carried.
This is the most affecting war novel I’ve ever read. It is: world-destroying, and also: world-restoring. It is as brave an act of storytelling and remembering as I’ve ever seen, and it deserves to be read and treasured and passed down to succeeding generations and read again. A series of vignettes, written by the real Tim O’Brien, who really served in Vietnam, about a fictional Tim O’Brien, and fictionalizing his and his Alpha Company brothers’ real experiences there: the book lives and dies by the idea that “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” (p. 203) Crushing. Devastating. Devastating. Perfect. Lifesaving. I can’t give a high-enough recommendation for this novel.
Amen.
Which makes it all the more embarrassing for me to say that I hadn’t gotten the “point” of the book the day I gave an angsty little diatribe in the front of my sophomore lit class about relativism, historical realism, etc.
The day Tim O’Brien sat in on the class, red baseball cap and blue flannel pulled tightly around his face to blend in with the other students.
Now I have the added self-loathing cringe whenever I even look at the cover. Surprisingly it makes the book feel even more realistic….
Sigh.
e. August 27th. 2009. 6:29 am.
wooster: where all your youthful indiscretions get tangled up with brilliant and famous writers, greatly magnifying your regrets.
jnonfiction. August 27th. 2009. 7:22 am.
Man, that should be on the website. Or at least the commencement speeches….
e. August 27th. 2009. 11:13 am.
My godfather tells me he discovered this novel after telling his psychiatrist that he feels like if he was draftable during vietnam, it would have been cowardly not to move to canada (which comprises the theme of one of the more affecting episodes in the novel).
jnonfiction. September 9th. 2009. 8:10 am.