The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. This is on the (very) short list of books I've bought because I had to read them for a class, and enjoyed them. Though, oddly, it took another class assignment to get this onto the book log-- as mentioned on Uncertain Principles, I re-read this because I had volunteered to lead a discussion of it.

It's easy to see why they would assign this as summer reading, because the book offers a lot of discussion fodder. It's about Vietnam, always a good conversation-starter, and it's not only a work of fiction, it's one of those slippery meta-fiction deals that play fast and loose with reality. The book is written by a guy from Minnesota named Tim O'Brien who served in Vietnam in a unit called Alpha Company, and it tells the story of a guy from Minnesota named Tim O'Brien who served in Vietnam in a unit called Alpha company. Only, they're not the same guy. Spooky, huh?

I've actually heard O'Brien read from this book, and talk about the stories (part of the class in which it was assigned), and he told a "true" version of one of the stories. I put "true" in scare quotes because it's not clear that that version was really the truth, either. He's a complicated guy.

But, as he says in "How to Tell a True War Story," the centerpiece of the book (in some sense), "Absolute occurrence is irrelevant."

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man," and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead.

That's a true story that never happened.

Absolute occurrence aside, this is an incredibly powerful book. O'Brien's writing is wonderfully evocative, and the stories feel true. I'm not a big reader of Vietnam books, so I can't say for sure that it's the best ever written, but I have a hard time imagining a better, truer, war story than you'll find here. This is a fantastic book.