How long: I started Friday morning and I just around 5:00pm today.
Overall: Excellent, clear, concise prose. A real page turner.
I met O'Brien last summer at Sewanee after hearing him speak. His craft lecture was very similar to this book: a mixture of lessons in craft, lessons in life, a little about love, a little about death, a taste for the supernatural that is indeed a part of life, some truth, some fiction, maybe a lot of fiction, many contradictions, and a lot about story-telling.
Here, you get a war story (Vietnam, more specifically), a love story, a story about brotherhood, a coming-of-age story, and a narrative about story-telling itself. The chapters themselves often read as complete short stories, and that fragmented nature of the book lends itself well to the many different areas it covers - and, its success in telling so many stories at once.
I cannot wait to read more O'Brien. Oh, and if you don't have time for the whole novel, just read the title chapter: The Things They Carried. Great stuff there. Really great.
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