The significant other/man of the house/Mr Hufflepuff Cat/aka Doc now has a shelf all for himself (technically he has two, because I keep track of the books upstairs that are actually his), but he now has the docs-seal-of-approval shelf, to keep track of books he has read and enjoyed. This being the most recent addition to the shelf, I figured I'd make mention of it. He keeps pestering me to read TTTC and Gregg Allman's book in particular.
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I feel like I did read this in college, but for some reason my memory is extremely hazy in regard to this particular book and I can't remember one way or the other.
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A good book, and definitely one people ought to read, whether they're interested in Vietnam or not.

The one thing that drove me nuts is this: the book is presented as historical fiction. In the first pages, the reader is given the disclaimer that all characters etc are fictitious. The dedication mentions O'Brien's fellow soldiers by name-- the names he then uses for them throughout the book. One particular story, "Speaking of Courage", was written at the request of one of these fine gentlemen, and the follow-up notes reveal that the story was originally written as part of a novel, then taken out and published on its own, without the soldier's real name (which was requested). The version published here has been reworked and does, in fact, feature the soldier's real name, which corresponds with the name mentioned in the dedication. Therefore, my brain doesn't know what to make of this fictitious-but-real happening. My brain says "how can something be real and made up at the same time?"

I mean, I suppose certain elements could be made up, but still. Brain dun like it.

Other than that, though, this was a very good collection of stories.

"[Death is] like being inside a book that nobody's reading."

This is a pretty damn good book, which got me thinking. I'm thinking if I read two or three books every month until my great granddaughter is born, there will still be hundreds of great books I haven't read. Now, I don't know if I should find that fact encouraging or discouraging. Don't get me wrong! I'm not expecting a great granddaughter anytime soon! No siree. If my current estimate is correct, I don't expect to get a great grandchild for a couple of decades. Now that there is a motivational thought! It motivates me to keep myself and my wife alive for a good while. In a couple of decades, we'll both be 95 years young. (95 going on a hundred.)

My wife has survived cancer, and I've survived a stroke, so I figure living to the age of 95 will be a piece of cake. (In my case, make it a slice of pumpkin pie.)

By now, you're probably wondering how do I know that my first great-grandchild will be a girl. I know because I've read that the past is prologue. (Remember I read Sparknotes for the Tempest here on Goodreads.) Shakespeare also said, "What must be shall be." (I think I remember Rita Moreno singing about that in West Side Story.) More to my point, Shakespeare said, "It is a wise [great grand] father that knows his own [great grand] child."

Now, I don't have any great wisdom, but I do know a little about my family genealogy. Specifically, I know quite a bit about the direct descendants of my great great grandfather Levi Null (1794-1875). I know quite a lot about Levi's descendants going from him all the way to my granddaughter. I know that in all those seven generations of Nulls, every single firstborn child has been a girl. (What are the odds?)

To be honest, there is one possible exception. My grandfather Thomas Levi Null (1863-1913) was a fraternal twin. (He's the Okie who had a farm near Roosevelt, OK who died a week after a mule kicked him in the head.) Anyway, one of his letters has survived. In his letter, Thomas Levi seemed to be a courteous sort of guy, so we have every reason to believe he let his sister, Lillian Mae, go first.

"I'll carry that," I hear every day. My husband carries the things I can't. Things too heavy for me. He's good that way. Good at carrying things. Two wars and he hasn't forgotten. Like Tim O'Brien, he can tell you what he packed, what it weighed, and what extra he took with him. There are other things, too, memories that don't go away. Some good. Some terrible. How much any soldier says can depend on the listener as much as the war.

The vignette form works perfectly here. Piece by piece, each is a fragment of a larger picture which gives a human face to soldiering. Darkly humorous at times. Jarring. The Things They Carried is based on O'Brien's experience of the Vietnam War. But, much of it has relevance beyond its time.

For me, this book is a reminder to say "Thanks" to a husband not just for carrying those groceries into the house.

This book was first published in 1990 and was re-issued in 2013. In 1990 it won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Critics Circle Award, and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. The book is listed as fiction it is based on Tim O’Brien’s real life experience in the Vietnam War. O’Brian says writing as fiction gave him more leeway in character development and also in the story. The book’s opening with the title, “The things they carried” shifted from mundane to meaningful in telling what they carried for example: mosquito netting, machetes, pens, letter from a girl. By the end of the story you know the men, and have a good sense of what they are up against. The book also discusses O’Brien’s visit to Vietnam with his wife visiting the area he served in during the war. The book goes back and forth between the pass and the present time frame. Over all it is an interesting read. I read this as an audio book. Bryan Cranston did a good job narrating the book. If you are interested in the Vietnam War you should read this book.

These connected stories are about young men in their late teens and early twenties doing their best to carry the weight of a brutal war on their shoulders, along with dozens of pounds of field kit and weaponry. They carry so much weight it is hard to even imagine how they could walk the miles they did, crossing rivers, muddy streams, up hills and down into valleys, somehow placing one foot in front of the other while their eyes and ears scan for danger.

The equipment is not all they carry. Some carry guilt, some carry cowardice, some carry aggression, some carry courage, some carry fear, some carry righteousness, some carry hatred, and some carry doubt. Of all the feelings they carry, the weight of futility has to be the hardest to bear. Maybe futility isn’t the right word. They carry with them the knowledge that where they are and what they are doing is all the choice they have. Short of doing damage to themselves to be airlifted out of there, they all carry the weight of being stuck.

These stories don’t stop with the horror and macabre humour of being part of a platoon of young men in war. There is also a story about what one of them experienced after the war. His need to talk about it and his inability to do so. His recognition that he needs purposeful work versus his doubt that any such thing exists any more.

Tim O’Brien’s writing is exceptional. With one sentence he can cut to the heart of an event. Occasionally he uses repetition of a scene or sequence that made me feel I was there, living it, then re-living the shock of it, trying to find the sense in it.

This book does not go into the politics of war and does not mention the hawks sitting behind huge desks with lovely scenery outside their windows, busy directing traffic regardless of what the cost in human lives may be. So, I won’t go into it, either.

This book is about being in the thick of the traffic – driving blind in a night so dark there is no difference between eyes-open and eyes-closed. It is about not knowing – if you have enough gas, if a tire will blow, if the vehicle will overheat, if it will be blown up into the trees or bogged down and sunk in a field of sewage. It is about being one of many little vehicles with two legs and heavy burdens to carry and not knowing if you will ever see home again.

This was a Traveling Sisters Group read with Brenda, Diane, JanB, Marialyce, and Nikki. This was a great choice for a Group read and discussion and I enjoyed it a lot. For more reviews of this book as well as many others, visit the Sisters blog at https://twogirlslostinacouleereading....

This book/memoir is everything you want in a collection of war stories. It touches upon all the sentiments and realities that I have always been curious about, but too embarrassed to ask. Tim O'Brien is a brilliant writer, there's no doubt about that. There's a wistfulness in his writing that reminds me of conversations with my Grandpa over hot tea on bright summer mornings. I'm just a child listening to the stories of a world, of a time I can't imagine, that I'm privileged enough to never have been a part of. This is a great book for the summer time. It's easy to put down and pick up. It is divided into several short stories, if you will, and each one is moving and emotional in its own way. War stories aren't usually my thing, but I may go out of my way to pick up another book by Tim O'Brien in the near future.

For more bookish photos, reviews and updates follow me on instagram @concerningnovels.

I first bought The Things They Carried at the Bruised Apple, a used bookstore and coffee shop in downtown Peekskill, New York, back in 1991 when I was fifteen years old. By the time I graduated from high school a few years later I'd read it so often that the pages, already brittle, were nearly worn through, entire sections underlined in pencil. Loaned out and lost to a college crush years ago, a dear friend bought me a replacement copy awhile back signed to me by Tim O'Brien himself. This new copy is not quite as loveworn, but still it is cherished.

The beauty of this book lies not necessarily in the war stories at its center, but rather in the undulating, overlapping entanglements that are people's lives, in the act of using storytelling as a means of recapturing our histories, bringing the many facets of our so often fragmented selves forward into the present day. The lyrical poetry of O'Brien's writing combined with the brutality of Vietnam imagery is truly a shock, traumatizing yet powerfully beautiful in its way, and the force of language itself is a revelation.

As O'Brien writes, "The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head."

"Forty-three years, and the war happened half a lifetime ago, yet remembering makes it present. And sometimes remembering leads to a story, and that makes it eternal. Stories serve to connect the past to the future. Stories serve for those late-night moments when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories serve for eternity, when every memory is erased, when there's nothing left to remember except the story."

The stories march on, one after another, under the obsessive rhythm of the marches, as we follow the soldiers through the forest, up and down the hills, into the rice paddies. We bear the weight of their uniforms, their weapons and ammunition, we bear the weight of their memories, letters, guilt, and ghosts.

"A true war story, it's like a bellyache."

"The sky was overcast. I passed through towns with familiar names and pine forests, and then I found myself on the prairie, and then in Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then back home. I survived, but this is not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war."

No side, we receive no moral, no ultimate and definitive truth, Tim O'Brien has no opinions, he just tells war stories: love stories. The terror, the violence, the sweetness, the embarrassment, the beauty, the evil, the obscenity, the purity, without all of that there would be no story, they are the facets of war. A true war story is made up of many stories, which never only speak of death, but always also of life.

"I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why sometimes the truth of the story is truer than the truth of the events."

I find it difficult to believe that it is a work of fiction.It reads like a memoir. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It’d be a bad idea to challenge Tim O’Brien to a round of Truth-Or-Dare because he’d find a way to pick Truth, launch into a story, recant it, then make you think he really chose Dare, but in the end, you’ll be pretty sure he actually told you the Truth after all. Maybe…

That’s kind of the point about this account of his time Vietnam as an infantry soldier that warns us that war stories are tricky. The ones that sound true are probably lies and the ones that seem outlandish probably have a healthy dose of truth in them. By telling us some fact and some fiction, then revealing which is which (Allegedly.), O’Brien shows that sometimes a well told lie based on fact has more power than a real story accurately told.

Taken together, O’Brien’s stories make it clear that he spent the decades after the war mulling over the various things he took away from it. This isn’t the memoir of a guy who obtained some kind of closure by writing it, it’s the story of the fear, doubt and confusion he still wrestled with decades later. In order to convey that experience, he had to tell the reader some war stories and let us decide just how true they were.

I’ve read any number of books where the Vietnam War has featured large in the context of the central narrative. I’ve read a few fictional books that have been largely or wholly about the war itself or the impacts of the war on the people caught up in it. I’ve even read one or two non-fiction books that have sought to explain why the war was fought. I do find this subject fascinating; partly, I think, because I can’t think of any military action the UK’s recent history that has caused such a kick-back against the conflict itself and – perhaps more importantly – those who fought in it. Ok, we’ve had our moments, but nothing approaching the debates and angst that have centred around this conflict.

When I read a review on this book by Ɗắɳ 2.☠ I knew it was one I needed to track down. I quickly ascertained that an audio version was available and narrated by non other than Breaking Bad’s Brian Cranston. Well, having spent a few months last year drowning myself in the adventures of Walter White and his crew, what could be better? And an inspired choice it turned out to be. Cranston’s reading was superb - his voice smooth and mellow but with a touch of gravel. Perfect.

It’s a hard book to categorise. The author has clearly delivered something here that is semi-biographical, but at the same time he points out that in recounting stories our imagination helps to form our memories – therefore the resulting vignettes are a mix of things that happened and things that might not have, but ‘felt’ like they did. The line between fact and fiction is blurred to the point it’s impossible to tell one from the other.

Tim O’Brien spent a year in Vietnam. He never really expected to, a newly graduated Minnesota College student he’d already been accepted for graduate school at Harvard when the draft notice dropped. By nature, he was mildly anti-war and even made a half-hearted attempt to make a run for it to Canada. But in the end, as he puts it, he was a coward: he went to Vietnam.

I hadn’t realised this Pulitzer Prize-winning book was written over twenty-five years ago. As a result, there’s sure to be a huge number of excellent reviews available to break down the details. So I’ll limit myself to some of my thoughts as I listened to this book in the course of a couple of days.

There is a distinct lack of actual war here. What I mean is that there are no battles. O’Brien’s platoon spent their time chasing the enemy, but they never caught them. What they did see was the flashes of gunfire from the foliage and bodies on the ground. They lost soldiers, and they did things that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. The prose is simple, the language often raw. But there’s humour too, in surprising quantities. The point is made that these weren’t hardened career soldiers. They were boys – and they often acted like it. The episodes are fractured but together comprise a cohesive account of the experiences of a single platoon of soldiers. It’s riveting stuff.

At the end of the book, there is also, on this audio version, a section where the author himself reads an essay he penned, titled The Vietnam in Me. It’s a rougher piece, but it’s intriguing to hear the author describe a trip he made to Vietnam some twenty years after the end of the conflict. It really did accentuate the mental anguish and ongoing struggles many ex-combatants experience.

Overall it’s one of the most powerful audiobooks I’ve ever listened to. I’m haunted by it. I can’t forget it.

It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen. (from "How to Tell a True War Story")

Because I'd previously read the title story in The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: Fifty North American American Stories Since 1970 and later in The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Writing, I was under the impression this book would be a collection of short stories about the Vietnam War. It is, I guess, but it also isn't.

Some of the stories can't stand alone and the ones that do are more interrelated than in a 'traditional' short-story collection, and yet it's hard to think of the work as a novel, as O'Brien at times writes as if it's memoir, though the book's subtitle calls it "a work of fiction" [emphasis mine]. So, forget labels. The importance is that the work achieves a cumulative power as it goes on, like the incantatory prose outlining the things the men carry in the title story. The 'carrying' reverberates throughout the work.

O'Brien is a character in his own work of fiction because it doesn't matter if it's factual or not; because whether it is or isn't, it is true -- as are other arguably definitive pieces of so-called war fiction. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that each war inspires work along the same themes as O'Brien's: The Red Badge of Courage for the American Civil War; for WWI, All Quiet on the Western Front (which I haven't read yet, but see Ted's review here) and maybe even A Long Long Way; and the list could go on. These books are, or have been, widely read and yet still we must wonder if anyone is listening.