The Things They Carried

This is another book my daughter was assigned to read in school and she recommended it to me. Tim O'Brien provides an engrossing insight to the Vietnam War in The Things They Carried.

Page 20:  They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. 

Page 44:  It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead. 

Page 84:  In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't' tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh." 

Page 255:  But this too is true: stories can save us. 

Page 265:  The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow. 

Yeah, I recommend it too.

Gone Girl

I haven't seen the movie, but Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was a frightening ride. At first I was a little annoyed with the babble of the writing. On page 10 Amy babbles on in her diary: "Carmen, a newish friend--semi-friend, barely friend, the kind of friend you can't cancel on--has talked me into going out to Brooklyn, to one of her writers' parties." I stuck with it and over 200 pages in we learn that Amy isn't dead after all, she's just psycho-bitch crazy and the blather of her diary was her elaborate ruse at teaching her husband a lesson for cheating on her by framing him for her murder. Yikes. These people are seriously disturbed. And disturbing. Especially with the unsettling resolution.

Yikes.