Audiobook narrated by Bryan CarsonI've never thought I would give 5* to a collection of stories about War even if it deals with the Vietnam conflict, the one that interests me the most. However, here I am, lost for words in front of this masterpiece. The book is a collection of related short stories about the author's time as a soldier in Vietnam. It is a memoir of sorts, definitely antiwar. The author informs us from the beginning that he is unreliable, that the events in the stories might of m...

[Edited for typos and spoilers 2/7/22]About 20 connected short stories from an author who has become the main literary spokesperson for the story of Americans in the Vietnam War. The book is highly rated on GR (4.1 with almost a quarter-million ratings). How often do you see the front pages with 40 blurbs praising the work from every recognized source you can think of: from the NT Times (which listed it as a Book of the Century) and The Wall Street Journal to Booklist and Publishers Weekly.The a...

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 c...

“It’s time to be blunt. I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented…I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth.”- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried has sat on my bookshelf for years. Maybe since high school, meaning that it has sat on various shelves, in various rooms, in ...

“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."I've admired Tim O’Brien’s writing since I first read Going after Cacciato several years ago; that book has long been one of my favorites. The Things They Carried is a different kind of book, but it shares with Going after Cacciato a powerful sense of how it feels for a soldier to be at war. O’Br...

It was in the spring of 2006 and I was on patrol in Kirkuk Iraq with a unit in the 101st Airborne. I had my full “battle rattle” on: helmet, body armor, vest with extra magazines, M4. We were in the Kurdish part of the city and it was a beautiful day in the bazaar. I came to love the Kurdish people, they were hardworking and resilient. Many people don’t know this but a percentage of Kurdish folks are red headed. No kidding, fair skin like me and RED hair. It was the kind of day where in the back...

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 health...

The Things They Carried reads like a confession, which, I suppose, in many ways it is. War is a theme in so many books, be they historical fiction, memoirs, alternate histories... and I've certainly read my fair share of them. But stretching my mind back over the years right now, I struggle to recall one that has affected me quite so much. Perhaps I would put it on equal footing with Drakulic's "S" - a heartbreakng novel about the treatment of women in the female war camps during the Bosnian war...

Awestruck may be the best way to describe how I felt upon reading this book the first time. So how did I feel upon reading it the second time? I just want to bow at Tim O'Brien's feet while muttering a Wayne's World style "I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy." Using non-linear narrative and stringing together seemingly unrelated stories into one ultimately cohesive work, O'Brien achieves something that traditional narrative never could: his work reflects the emotional truth of what it was like to be ...

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 co...