Banned Books Week - The Things They Carried

As a young man, I read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Excerpts from the book were required reading for a high school literature class. Some time after the assigned reading, my older brother and I were in the bookstore and I convinced him to buy it (mostly so that I could read it! Thanks Tony).

I had to read the rest of the book, because I knew that reading it would make me a better person and a better citizen. Yes, there is language in the book that I would not use in front of my mother, and yes, the book deals with violence and tragedy, but the book gave me a sense of the difficulty of dealing with trauma and helped me see what it meant to be at war. At the time, I was about to become a voting citizen in a country that was engaged in two costly and tragic wars. The book is written with (hold on for the English major cliché of the year) a level of verisimilitude that allows real empathy for the characters, while forcing the reader to acknowledge the true impossibility to know war without experiencing it. The book also deals directly with the difficulties surrounding returning from war and narrating trauma.

The challenges against The Things They Carried center mainly around its language, but for me it was that very language that made the book reliable and true and good.

This book is on my list of books that every young person should read. It will change your life.



P.S. Incidentally, I lived for about nine months in Worthington, Minnesota, where Tim O'Brien grew up . I frequently drove around lake Okabena and thought about the story "Speaking of Courage" almost every time. Driving around town became for me a mediation on death and life and pride and loss.