Hello and welcome to my post on The Things They Carried, and what I hope will be a good discussion of the book. I’ve never done this before, so we’ll just have to see how it goes.
I’d love the discussion in the comments to be between all of us. I encourage you to read the previous comments and respond to them — don’t be afraid to leave multiple comment at a time. There’s a REPLY link underneath each comment, so you can reply to specific posts. I’ll be at work today and can’t really blog, so responding to others will keep the discussion interesting.
As part of the little reading project/discussion I’m hosting for Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, I decided to post some discussion questions I found at Reading Group Guides.
You DO NOT have to answer these questions in your review or to participate – I’m just posting them for people who are interested. I’ll be basing my review around these questions because I think they’re good and I hope they’ll spark some thoughtful discussion.
Of all the books Tim O’Brien has written, I think The Things They Carried is the most well-known and well-read (but that’s just me). When I said I planned to read all of Tim O’Brien this summer, there was a lot of enthusiasm for this book in particular.
Because of that, I decided to encourage more people to join me in reading the book. My plan is to have it read by Monday, July 26 and put up a post that day. I’ll do a Mr. Linky so others can leave reviews or discussions, then I hope we’ll have a good chat in the comments.
This summer I’m reading the complete works of Tim O’Brien — one book every two weeks between the beginning of June and the beginning of September. I posted about his memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and now I’m catching up with the next two in the series.
I think if you made a graph of how much I like Tim O’Brien’s books so far, it’d be a slowly increasing line. If I Die in a Combat Zone had flashes of awesome, but wasn’t great. Northern Lights was better as a compelling adventure story. But Going After Cacciato is my favorite so far, and left me excited because I hope the trend continues.
I read this book as part of my personal challenge to read the entire works of Tim O’Brien this summer. I’d previously read The Things They Carried, a novel, in high school and remember being struck by the idea of truth in storytelling. The Things They Carried is a novel, meaning things in it did not happen exactly as O’Brien wrote. But what my class discussed is whether the feeling of the book, what it made us understand on some emotional level about what it was like to be there, was probably true, and that it’s sometimes ok to bend the facts in fiction to get at a larger truth of some kind.
