Three on Thursday

Joining Carole and friends for Three on Thursday, today with Three Books. I haven't written about books for a long time, except randomly on Unraveled Wednesdays, so it's high time. Here are the last three books I've read and one bonus.

1. The Things They Carried  
My review - 3 stars

The brother of an acquaintance is in the Reserves, but has recently been sent to Fort Dix, then on to TX, then to the Middle East for two years. With the current saber-rattling around Iran, I think of him every day. And of course, every soldier that the US has placed in harm's way is someone to somebody, so this book stood out to me during a recent perusal of library books. I also thought Memorial Day weekend would be a good time to finally read it. Its raw tales of friendship, soldiering, what those soldiers carried, and what they did are at times hard to read. This book didn't change the way I feel about Vietnam, but I don't think it's possible to make sense of the terror, destruction, and loss of war. Mainly I was reminded of how very young these young men were and how heavy the things were that they carried, both the physical battle armor and those things that were carried within.

2.  The Bright Hour
My review - 5 stars

That is Morning. To cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body and to become as large as the World. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Bright Hour is a beautifully written book that I will place alongside Atul Gawande's Being Mortal. Nina Riggs has written the story of the stages of her life, and while it is sad, poignant, and filled with cancer and death, that is ultimately not what the book is about. Instead, Nina writes about "how to distill what matters most to each of us in life in order to navigate our way toward the edge of it in a meaningful and satisfying way." That makes this a valuable and luminous book, and one that I think might be able to ease my own fears of death.

I am reminded of an image...that living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss. But that living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss, only with some fog or cloud cover obscuring the depths a bit more -- sometimes the wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover.

3.  We Need to Talk
My review - 3 stars

If you have an iota of common sense, you can probably guess much of what Celeste Headlee recommends in We Need to Talk: Listen more and talk less. She does elaborate on this point, telling us not to multitask, don't repeat yourself, don't pontificate, be brief, etc. These are all important points, as is the overall premise that conversation skills are important. I'm just not sure there is enough here to fill a whole book. Watch the TED talk and see what you think.

4.  Inland
My review - 5 stars

(I debated not including this book because it won't be published until August 13th, but it's so good that I wanted to give you a chance to place an early hold at the library!)

Inland is a western, but a new and exciting kind (to me, anyway). Think News of the World or The Son, with non-stereotypical characters, exquisitely descriptive settings, and almost fantasy-like plot lines. Obreht writes beautiful sentences that you will marvel at, but her writing never fails to tell a terrific story. 

In the midst of a drought in the Arizona Territories in 1893, we meet Nora, an independent frontierswoman, and Lurie, a former outlaw. Nora is waiting for her husband and sons to return to the parched homestead, while her youngest son is convinced that there is a mysterious beast prowling about. Lurie is haunted by the ghosts of his past who want him to take an epic journey. Nora’s story is told in one long, hot day, while Lurie’s takes place over decades. Their intersection is the perfect combination of magic and realism. 

While the book is densely written, required my attention, and I had to start again from the beginning after I stopped reading for a few days, once I read about the U.S. Army’s camel corps and understood that both Nora and Lurie speak to the dead, it was one of the best books I’ve read in quite a while. Read to the very end and you will be rewarded.

How about you? Read anything good (or even not so good)? Let me know!