Position:Home>Books & Authors> Which of these books would you recomend?

i haven't read Sacred Clowns or The Bean Trees!.

if you are looking for an easy read without having to think about much, then read The Lovely Bones!. it is a simple, predictable story!. it seems to get great reviews, especially here on yahoo answers!. it wasn't the best book i ever read, but it was one easy and simple!.

depending on what grade you are in , you will probably have to read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings at some point, so maybe you should just get it out of the way now!. it is a great book!. interesting and emotional!.

The Secret Life Of Bees was pretty good!. a bit over rated and predictable but interesting enough!. another good choice for an easy read if that is what you are looking for!.

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I loved The Secret Life of Bees!. It's touching and has the feel of To Kill a Mockingbird as it occurs in the South during the days of Jim Crowe Laws!. It's also being made into a movie right now!.

The Lovely Bones is disturbing to say the least, and you wouldn't be able to put it down!. It's being made into a movie right now!.

The Things They Carried would most likely be the most difficult read he writes in a different style!. Www@QuestionHome@Com

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The only book I've read on your list is "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou!. It is autobiographical and I believe it is the first book she wrote!. It is a touching, heartwarming story!.

The book by Isabel Allende also sounds like it would be a good read!. I've heard of her as an author, altho I can't recall what else she has written!.

Tony Hillerman is also an author I've heard of, but I haven't read any of his books and he is a prolific author as well!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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I have read all but
The Bean Trees
Daughter of Fortune (though I have read other Isabele Allende novels)
Forever

all so different
The Lovely Bones is sad and a mystery but so good
The Things They Carried is a War Novel
Into the Wild is a better book than movie that is for sure
The Secret Life of Bees is a good family mystery!.!.!.it depends if you want literary or not
though they are all heavy with material in different ways
my opinion: Read The Lovely BonesWww@QuestionHome@Com

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The Secret Life of Bees was very good, but I believe it was overrated in the long run!. The Lovely Bones really made me think, so if you're looking for that sort of book, check it out!. I haven't read the other books but I've heard of them!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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I like "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings"!. It's good!. Www@QuestionHome@Com

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OMG READ THE LOVELY BONES!!!! YOU WILL LOVE IT!.!.!.!.WELL AT LEAST I DID!.!.!.!.ITS KOOLWww@QuestionHome@Com

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ooh, I liked The Things They Carried!. Www@QuestionHome@Com

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sorry i havent read any of them!.!.!. ive heard good things about the secret life of beesWww@QuestionHome@Com

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The Things They Carried!.!.!.!. very fast read, read it in 3 days!. its a war story book, i read it for a college comp class my freshman year!. not sure if this will help ya out but i still have the paper i wrote about this book 8 years ago!.!.!.

The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien is a complication of short war stories!. This is a book full of fictional stories put together by O’Brien to give his readers a piece of his real experiences during the war!. But if his war stories are about the true stories of war, the overall issues are about the incredible internal struggles of each soldier, inside of the conflict of war!. He uses the war as a catalyst to teach readers how he had, and others dealt with their emotions!.
After writing The Things They Carried, O’Brien told one interviewer that the genesis of the book was the image of war as something to be carried, a weight of things that derived from his own experiences: “remembering all this crap I had on me and inside me, the physical and spiritual burdens” (Heberle, 178) The feelings the fellow soldiers of his platoon carried; along with himself, was his fuel to creating a literacy masterpiece!. The weight the soldiers endured with their equipment did not compare to the weight of insubstantial fears, hatreds, depressions, confusions, angers, and sufferings!. Tim O’Brien plays a strange role in The Things They Carried because he tells the read over and over all the stories are fictional, but then he dedicated this book to the main characters used in the book, bringing contradiction and a sense of reality to these short stories!.
One of the first combat troops to enter the Vietnam War, Marine Lieutenant Philip Caputo, had entered with a sense of ease with his troops!. Philip told a writer, “We carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit conviction that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten (Herring 144)!.” O’Brien’s character Lieutenant Jimmy Cross also had this feeling of a quick battle!. He had kept pictures of a past girlfriend with him, they gave his faith, they gave him a reason to what to be alive, and those pictures gave him the illusion that war was not as bad as it seems!. In the first chapter O’Brien describes the love his lieutenant Jimmy Cross had and soon realized that there was not a place for love in war!. “… Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha’s letters!. Then he burned the two photographs (O’Brien, 23)!.”
To bring a feeling of truth with his short stories, O’Brien uses a strange but effective writing style!. “ He uses just a few super-long sentences, but mixes this with very short sentences… He uses a lot of contradictions (Internet Source 1)!.” This helps to bring the reader into the war, into the story, and draws the reader into believing the characters!. The fiction soon becomes irrelevant and the emotions of the characters become true!. Sometimes a true story isn’t as truthful as a fabricated story, and when it comes to storytelling, O’Brien brings out emotions of characters through his writing style!. The dialogue used, brings the soldiers out of the pages and places them in Vietnam, as a reader, you can actually see the rainy fields, the long walks through the darkness, and you can also see death!. But the most important part about O’Brien’s writing style is that you don’t see the emotions of the soldiers, you feel them!.
Throughout The Things They Carried the narrator switches a few times, from Tim the soldier (the fictional Tim O’Brien) to members in his platoon!. One story told in the book dealt with the death of a friend!. Rat Kiley, a member of the platoon was playing catch with his best friend while the other soldiers were taking a break from walking!. Suddenly his friend Curt Lemon had stepped on a land mine and was blown into pieces!. But the death of a friend isn’t the point of this, not at all, just the beginning!. Later that day, the men stumble upon a baby water buffalo!. Rat Kiley pulls out his gun and shots the animal several times, not killing it, just blowing away pieces of the buffalo (O’Brien 78-79)!. The group watches in silence!. That is not a war story about death of a friend, but a story of pain, anger and coping with the reality of war!. O’Brien then goes on to say that it was all made up, except for the death of Curt Lemon!. “All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth… it wasn’t a war story!. It was a love story (O’Brien 85)!.”
The art of telling a war story isn’t about telling the absolute truth, the art is in getting the truest story beside the truth!. A model of a true story doesn’t deal truth; the truth might not get the actual true reaction wanted by the storyteller!. Now when anyone is telling a story, the goal is to get the listeners to get a glimpse of yourself, understand your inner most feelings!. If the truth is being stretched it doesn’t matter because the true story is want matters!. O’Brien goes on to say this about war stories, “True war stories do not generalize!. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis… War is hell!. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can’t believe it with my stomach!. Nothing turns inside!. It comes down to gut instinct!. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe (O’Brien 78)!.”
War stories are not about war!. War stories are about life, learning to live with problems, and sharing with each other!. War is not something that anyone wants to be involved in; it brings out the worst in nations and their men!. O’Brien thrives on this fact and uses his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam to deal with the dark things in life!. O’Brien writes, “And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war!. It’s about sunlight!. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do!. It’s about love and memory!. It’s about sorrow!. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen (O’Brien 85)!.”
Contradictions are shown often in The Things They Carried, O’Brien does this to make his point clear!. This book is fiction, nothing is true and there is no truth, only fantasies and storytelling!. That is the magnificence of this book!. The book is dedicated to the main characters in his book; he uses their names in the dedication and also in the book!. The names are made up, but then again are they!? O’Brien twists words, lies, tells truths, then admits to lies saying they are truths, and then goes on to say his truths are lies!. In the section, How to Tell a True War Story O’Brien starts off with the sentence, “This is true”, and directly following the story, he writes, “In many cases a true war story cannot be believes!. If you believe it, be skeptical (O’Brien 67&71)!.” By starting a chapter with a simple, this is true, sentence; he is inviting the reader to believe him!. As soon you the reader finally believes the story, O’Brien then makes you question what is true, is any of these stories true, does it matter!? And again back to the truth, “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true (O’Brien 82)!.”
In a book written about Tim O’Brien by Steven Kaplan, Kaplan said this about O’Brien’s approach to writing The Things They Carried!. “ He creates a community of individuals immersed in the act of experiencing the uncertainty of all events, regardless of whether these events occurred in Vietnam, in a small town in Minnesota (where O’Brien was raised), or somewhere in the reader’s own life (Kaplan 188)!.” Nothing matters to O’Brien when telling a story except to get his point across!. Fiction can only be expanded so far before it actually turns into non-fiction and O’Brien has achieved this!. For the stories to give off uncertainty to the readers and trick the readers to believing the unbelievable stories is O’Brien’s way of making the reader think about life!.
The lives of the soldiers in The Things They Carried were burdened by the physical weight of equipment, around 80 pounds for each soldier!. But that didn’t hold a candle in the wind to the intangible things they carried!. The foundation of the book is basis on these intangible weights on the soldier’s shoulders!. O’Brien writes in the first chapter, “ For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity!. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn’t, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus… and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die!. They carried emotional baggage of men who might die!. Grief, terror, love, longing… they carried shameful memories (O’Brien 19-21)!.” The descriptiveness used by O’Brien makes the reader have feelings for these fictional characters, sometimes feelings of sorrow, sometimes feelings of sadness, and even once in a while feelings of happiness!. Without the use of these weights on the soldiers’ souls and spirits, the characters remain just that, characters!. These guys become real to readers, because of the intangible weights!. Described by another writter, “These intangible objects are essential part of them and therefore cannot be put down, but carried and endured (Internet Source 2)!.”
Tim O’Brien as the narrator shows an example of how a fabricated story can be more truthful than a real war story!. “ For example, we’ve all heard this one!. Four guys go down a trail!. A grenade sails out!. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his buddies!. Is it true!? The answer matters!. You’d feel cheated if it never happened!. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue!. Yet even if it did happen- and maybe it did, anything’s possible- even then you know it can’t be true because a true war story doesn’t depend upon that kind of truth… For example: Four guys go down a trail!. A grenade sails out!. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway!. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “the **** you do that for!?” and the jumper says, “ Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead!. That’s a true war story that never happened (O’Brien 83-84)!.” That is the magic that is created by O’Brien, whether the story he is telling is true or false, it does not matter, it’s the subject that matters!. The story just told isn’t happy or sad, it is just a story about war, or maybe it isn’t about war; does it matter!?
After finishing The Things They Carried, O’Brien gave a response to an interviewer soon after publication!. He said, “My best book!. There’s no doubt in my mind about it… In this book, I forced myself to try to invent a form I had never invented before (Herzog 104)!.” This form O’Brien is describing is also a chapter in his book titled, Good Form!. He comes right out and said that he was a soldier in Vietnam, and almost everything else is made up (invented)!. He remembered watching a man die, and just his presence was guilt enough, which leads to the chapter called The Man I Killed!. In that chapter he illustrates that he had in fact killed a man, but in actuality he didn’t, but to give the readers the sense of his guilt, he turned that into another one of his war stories!. At the end of the chapter good form he sums up the death of the Vietnamese soldier by saying that honestly, “I didn’t kill anyone”, and also honestly say, “ I did kill someone” (O’Brien 179-180)!.”
This book had surprised a lot of readers and became an automatic best seller!. The Things They Carried was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and also the Pulitzer Prize (Internet Source 3)!.
Truth and true are relative terms; their definitions mean nothing to the imagination!. O’Brien has contradicted his truths, his true stories, and also made his fiction become non-fiction to the reader!. And O’Brien has said it best when he ended his story with this line, “… Thirty years later, I realize it as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story (O’Brien 146)!.” This book along with other war books by O’Brien, allow him to cope with his feelings!. I feel The Things They Carried will be studied through out the future of literacy!. This blue collar approach and style has pit O’Brien’s The Things They Carried into a white collar category all alone!. Www@QuestionHome@Com

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