Ooh, Doug, you're sooo dance-plannery!

"Her green slippers were the most beautiful things he had ever seen." - p. 143

Chapter nine has been my favorite chapter thus far. What a ridiculously hyperbolic statement. I mean, who am I to judge that her slippers aren't the most beautiful things he's ever seen? But... they're slippers... so....

House slippers, even, I think. Not ruby, not glass, but house. I chose that quote because it was lit-termy, but this one is my favorite, I think:

"Zip, and then zip; zip, and then zip; he was enchanted." - p. 143

It's a little bit adorable. He reminds me of Herman Melville, the lake monster from Doug's 1st Movie. Anyone? Anyone. No? That's all right.

Dear Fred, Try Being Alive.

I'm going to see John Green in Plainfield tomorrow. *happyskip* Therefore, this happens now.

"No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself." - p. 19

Oh, Victor... we all know you're hyperbolizing. It's simply not possible that our dear Frankenstein knows all human beings personally. Even with his fancy-schmancy science knowledge, he isn't that advanced. Also, eeeeverybody knows they didn't invent the Thought Police until... well, sometime in the 1900s, presumably, and Frankenstein takes place in the illustrious year of 17__. Good year, that. Anyway, somebody out there probably had a better childhood than Victor Frankenstein did. He clearly doesn't know it, but if he stopped and thought about what he was thinking, he might realize how preposterous such a statement that was, if taken literally. Of course, I suppose happiness is probably a pretty difficult thing to measure, so it'd be pretty hard to prove somebody else had it better. ...But still.

~DFTBA~

Well Shoot

How do I only have nineteen blog posts for this book?

I think I'll review the book reviews on the back cover.

"The best American writer of his generation."

--San Francisco Examiner

I dunno about that. I'm a pretty big Suzanne Collins fan right now.

"The Things They Carried is as good as any piece of literature can get."

--Chicago Sun-Times

That's pretty good. As soon as a book gets labeled as "literature," I become instantly wary of it. I didn't mind this book, though, and that's as good as it's going to get.

"This is writing so powerful that it steals your breath." --Milwaukee Journal

Definitely it's powerful. It didn't cause me any breathing problems, for which I am thankful.

"Rendered with an evocative, quiet precision, not equaled in the imaginative literature of the American war in Vietnam." --Washington Post

I can't vouch for this one; I'm a Vietnam novel novice.

"You've got to read this book... These stories shine in a strange and opposite direction, moving against the flow, illuminating life's wonder, life's tenuousness, life's importance."

--Dallas Morning News

I have two problems with this decidedly rather eloquent review. First, it doesn't end the first sentence with enough periods. I really think there ought to be four--three to illustrate the ellipsis/trailing off and one to show the end of the sentence. I also don't like that it told me I have to read it. I mean, I don't even live in Dallas.

"A book so searing and immediate you can almost hear the choppers in the background... This is prose headed for the nerve center of what was Vietnam."

--Boston Globe

I am forgiving the three-period thing. Maybe it's a personal preference, but anyway, the consistent three-period-pattern suggests that perhaps that's a Mariner Books influence.

"An ultimate, indelible image of war in our time, and in time to come."

--Los Angeles Times

I guess. I mean, it'll probably stick with me for a while. I won't be around forever, so... "indelible"... maybe not. That's commonplace hyperbole, though, I guess.

The Lives of the Dead: Linda

When I first started this chapter, my thoughts were something along the lines of Linda? Who's Linda? Then I felt bad, and I started thinking about how after a while, a big number is the same number no matter how big it is. How many people died in 9/11? Was it a thousand or a million or a billion? I have no idea. All of those are just a lot. I already don't remember how many people died in this book, but I know all of it was tragic.

Then I realized Linda hadn't been introduced yet, and I felt better, but still.

The soldiers felt it too:

"There was a formality to it, like a funeral without the sadness." - p. 215

One can only be sad about things for so long.

"It's easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead. And so a VC nurse, fried by napalm, was a crispy critter. A Vietnamese baby, which lay nearby, was a roasted peanut. 'Just a crunchie munchie,' Rat Kiley said as he stepped over the body."

Aside from the fact that those are terribly disturbing euphemisms, O'Brien is pointing out what the Nazis illustrated--that it's easy to dismiss something if it's not human in our eyes.

Also, "Rat Kiley liked to spice it up with extra details." - p. 227

That means he's HYPERBOLIZING! YAAAAAAAY!

"Death sucks," page 230, is an understatement, if you ask me, and "Do I look dead?" on page 231 is a rhetorical question, I believe. Also, "Once you're alive," she'd say, "you can't ever be dead," is sort of an aphorism, and it reminds me of a moment in Harry Potter, which eloquently points out the Christian belief in the afterlife:

"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

"Harry read the words slowly, as though he would have only one chance to take in their meaning, and he read the last of them aloud.

"'The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death'..." A horrible thought came to him, and with it a kind of panic. "Isn't that a Death Eater idea? Why is that there?"

"It doesn't mean defeating death in the way the Death Eaters mean it, Harry," said Hermione, her voice gentle. "It means... you know... living beyond death. Living after death." - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, p. 328

They have the a common moral, The Things They Carried and Harry Potter. This is why I liked this book better than The Sun Also Rises.

Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong: Mystical Mary Anne and Multiplying by Maybe

Having finished the novel and numbered its table of contents, I have been forced to abandon the impression that this book contained exactly twenty chapters. I am at a loss.

In any case, I noticed a couple of lit terms in action again, I believe:

"From the sixth grade on they had known for a fact that someday they would be married, and live in a fine gingerbread house near Lake Erie, and have three healthy yellow-haired children, and grow old together, and no doubt die in each other's arms and be buried in the same walnut casket. That was the plan." - p. 90

I'm pretty sure that's both ironic and hyperbolic. First, O'Brien doesn't seem to be particularly close to Mark Fossie or Mary Anne Bell. He can't know the deepest, most desperate desires of their hearts.

Thusly, he's being verbally ironic. His intent is, I think, to mock the flamboyancy of their "love." When he says they planned to have three blond-haired babies together, he means that they've been together a long time, or it seems so, and theirs is the type of relationship in which he expects they might have had conversations regarding their potential future together. *deepbreath*

That's also a type of hyperbolizing. He's exaggerating their relationship to the point of near-mockery. Nobody really lives in a gingerbread house.

Additionally, I don't really know what "Greenies" are or what it means to be "out on ambush," as Mary Anne was.