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Bonjour, bloggity-followers! Remember how I used to make lists? Well, I still do it, and here's one for you.

Reading Material I Have Purchased on My New Kindle:

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The latest issue of The Onion
Uncle Tom's Cabin (author unnecessary, you know who wrote it.)
Great Expectations (see parenthesis above)
War and Peace (see parenthesis above above)
Emma by Jane Austen-- I hate reading Jane Austen novels, but I figure I need to have an educated hatred.

I'm very nearly finished reading The Things They Carried and I must admit it's one of the best books I've ever read. I'm quickly becoming a bleeding-heart pacifist thanks to this grim look at the Vietnam Conflict. Some people complain that O'Brien made it all up, but even he says that some fiction, especially about war, can tell the truth better than a simple presentation of the facts would do. Some favorite quotes:

"They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried."

"They shared the weight of memory."

"They carried the land itself--Vietnam, the place, the soil--a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity."

"...for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry."

"He enjoyed not being dead."

"They died so as not to die of embarrassment."

"You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present."

"A true war story is never moral...you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil."

"Real hoity-toity, all very civilized, except this isn't civilization. This is Nam."

"...all I felt was the awkwardness of remembering."