Where Are We Going with This? Book Review of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

 

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, we are given an insight into what being a grunt in Vietnam looked like. We learn stories of death and horror and desensitization and survival. We learn how it felt to kill and how it felt to be wounded. We learn how the men supported each other and sometimes failed each other.

The title story of The Things They Carried is widely taught and anthologized, and for good reason. In “The Things They Carried,” the driving force behind the story is the anaphoric phrase, “the things they carried” followed by the literal and figurative things that the soldiers schlepped with them as they traveled through Vietnam. The story is poetic and lyrical, in large part because of the repeated phrase, but also because of the attention to rhythm and detail. For example, the story begins with First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, who is leading the men, and who is carrying letters from a young woman as well as her pictures. The bigger weight is his love and desire for her, which is unrequited.

The opening story begins the juxtaposition of men who are not emotionally prepared for the violence, hatred, and indifference of war. None seem to be career military, just men who were drafted and heeded the call. They are united by their fear of death, their desire to live, and their methods of staying sane.

The stories in the book are all clearly linked, and more than once, a story is followed by a metafiction account of what was changed to make it a story and why. The narrator does not figure as a character in the opening story, but as the book continues, his status as character grows and wanes, but his importance as author to the stories certainly grows. He is the one who remembers for all of those young men, who extends their mortality by writing about them, and who alters the stories to make them into stories and to create justice, explore emotions, and to just give the experiences meaning. Has the truth been altered? Yes. Has the Truth been altered? O’Brien takes pains to help us think not.

The stories are dark and terrible, as you would assume. They are uncomfortable to read. But the book is just as much about writing as it is about war.

Would I teach this book? Short answer, yes. Longer answer, if reading the entire book of short stories, it seems more appropriate for a higher level literature course in which the students could appreciate the technical beauty and sophistication of the stories. As stated previously, the book is as much a collection of short stories as it is a discussion of writing and the process of transforming life into art.

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I Love You to a Black Hole and Back: Book Review of Under Alien Skies

 

Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer's Guide to the Universe by Philip Plait
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thank you to W. W. Norton and GoodReads Giveaways, from whom I received an ARC of Dr. Philip Plait’s Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe in exchange for a fair and honest review.

In Under Alien Skies, Plait takes us across the universe, exploring our solar system, galaxy, and beyond. He helps the reader imagine being a tourist in many different places--from the moon to a dwarf star to a black hole. Each adventure has corresponding evidence and history of how we know what we know. There is much to learn from this book, especially for someone like me, who has not learned about space since middle school. I didn’t have astronomy in high school or college, so that is the case for me.

In the second person sections which describe the different trips throughout the universe, Plait creates the experience of being on a spaceship and describing both the sensations and what you might see. There is a captain, of course, and moments when everyone on board is viewing together. There is some discussion of the travel it takes to get there, and admissions from the author when things would have been fudged to make the impossible (as we know it) possible.

The majority of the book, however, is dedicated to science, discussing the composition of planets and stars, the effect of gravity in different places, the possibility of humans traveling to or living in different places. The tone is chatty and the language is not complicated, though it introduces the reader to a lot of vocabulary. This book is clearly written for the common person, and not someone who knows a whole lot about space. There is a lot of information, and if you are looking for a good science writing book, here it is.

Would I teach this book? Well--probably not. I can see that this is a good book. That’s obvious. But it was a little too dense to be entertaining to me. It took me a while to read and I found it to be--well--not to my taste. So, while there might be a lot in the book for my students to learn, it would not be enjoyable for me. And I cannot say that a lot of the information stuck with me. I found my mind drifting in several places. So. while I might recommend this to others who enjoy science writing, especially astronomy, I would not assign it for my class.

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Fantasy Island: Book Review of Relics of Youth

 

Relics of Youth: Volume 1 by Chad Rebmann
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thank you, Fort Vancouver Regional Library, for sending the bookmobile out to the rural school where I teach and enabling me to check out Relics of Youth by Matt Nicholas, Chad Rebmann, Skylar Patridge, and Vladimir Popov.

In Relics of Youth, Nat Rodriguez has gathered five other teenagers to journey together and find the island that has mysteriously appeared as a tattoo on all of them. There is the rich boy, the former child star, the goody-two-shoes, the tight-laced boy who’s about to join the military, the boy going through chemo, and Nat, who is an orphaned misfit. Not all the teens are so excited about the trip, as they are quite skeptical. The rich boy, Garrett, is taking them all out on his massive yacht and almost immediately there are squabbles. Once on the island, they discover that they have been followed by villains, and in order to stay alive, they must stick together--especially after strange things start to happen. The crew needs to solve the mystery of the island that summoned them before their pursuers can take them down.

Relics of Youth sets itself up as a current day story based on myths. The main characters are clearly stereotypes and it is just as clear that the six will pair off into three couples, though to my taste, I would have preferred less obvious coupling . It feels almost as though the comic was dreaming itself as a movie. A little more subtlety all the way around would have done the plot wonders.

It seemed that the volume was set up to be the beginning of a series, but I could not find any additional volumes, and this one came out in 2020. It may have been another endeavor that crumbled due to Covid or perhaps this volume did not sell enough to follow up. In any case, though I was a bit underwhelmed by the first volume, I was interested in reading a second volume--though if the library did not have it, I doubt that I would have purchased it.

Would I teach this book? I doubt it. Relics of Youth seems recursive of Runaways and Teen Titans. If I were teaching a graphic novel class, I would be more likely to teach one of those series than Relics of Youth, as these characters did not grab me as much and it seems nearly unfathomable that their parents would be okay with their teenaged children traveling without them or another chaperone. There’s fantasy and then there’s fantasy.

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