The Things They Carried

All right.

So my number three is The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

So have you read this one before? Not read it and also have

not heard of

top my top three are very sad like these are dark books like Norwegian Wood um No Country for Old Men.

Pretty much anything by McCarthy is like that Western noir darkness.

And The Things They Carried.

Like those three are very,

And it's really moving the way these people can talk to each other from those different perspectives in just this little trailer that we've seen.

Paulina, one of my favorite books about war is The Things They Carried.

Was there any inspiration in the title? That's Tim O'Brien, for those who don't know about the Vietnam War.

Was that in part how you ended up with What We Carry or no?

But there's not like one that really like sticks out to me is like, oh, my God.

You know, our main book actually for college, for going into college, you know, like every most school, many schools, I should say, have like one book like all the first years read was The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

Oh, OK.

And I remember getting to the end of that.

In the late afternoon after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.

The title story in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is built around a long list of the objects American soldiers took with them as they fought in Vietnam.

Some, like Jimmy Cross's letters, or in another case, a soldier's girlfriend's tights, were personal or for luck.

Others, like can openers, pocket knives and mosquito repellent, were practical.

The humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it.

They carried gravity.

The Things They Carried is one of the great works of the Vietnam War.

And in every one of the 22 short stories the book contains, the protagonists carry that symbolic weight with them.

So it started in undergrad.

I had to write a thesis and I was reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and reading some literary trauma theory.

Trauma theory and literature is just this beautiful match because when you experience a trauma, your mind is very protective.

You don't experience it in the moment.

Is there any book that you want to read again? I think we've kind of touched on this a couple times, but you can share it again.

This one I haven't talked about yet, but it's called The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

Oh,

that's a good