Vote for Somerville Reads 2011

Please help us decide our next book for Somerville Reads 2011. Please click on the below link and vote for your book choice. We hope to decide the next book by the fall and the program will launch in April of 2011.

Thanks for your input!

http://polldaddy.com/s/C61A07679A2F6F00

Somerville Reads Concludes

Thank you to all who participated in and supported our first Somerville Reads program! We hope you will continue to read The Things They Carried and to explore other Vietnam-related materials; many choices are listed on the left-hand side of this blog. The blog will stay active, as a place for future Somerville Reads programs and a place for your voice and opinions to be heard. We hope to have a lot of community input on the next book selection, for the 2011 program. Stay tuned to this blog for a survey and let us know the book you would like Somerville to read!

Finally, I leave you with a beautiful piece of artwork, created by our staff member Meghan. She is a librarian-by-day, but most certainly, an artist at heart. There is a lot to reflect upon in this painting and a lot to carry with us as we move forward.


Keep Reading!

Stories Can Save Us

Please enjoy Michael Downing's reflections upon The Things They Carried, which he shared with our discussion group on Saturday April 17.

Stories Can Save Us: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Michael Downing/michaeldowningbooks.com

As a teacher, I find it hard to remember how I talked to students about the war in Vietnam before the publication of Tim O’Brien’s book. Maybe I didn’t. I think for a lot of teachers and students, for a lot of parents and children, for a lot of veterans and Americans who’ve never served in the military, not talking about the war seemed like a relief after the confusion and division and shouting that had dominated debates from kitchen tables to Congress for so many years.

But silence takes a toll on people. The stories that people were not allowed to tell, the truths that they were not allowed to share—they didn’t go away. They were carried. And I think the weight of an untold truth can wear a person down.

A well-told story—a sad story or a love story or even a ghost story—can lift your spirits. And the twenty-two stories in The Things They Carried are, I think, uplifting—ennobling. “The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has,” said Tim O’Brien in answer to a question from a caller to a radio show on which he recently appeared, “no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about what the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.” [as quoted by John Greenya in a review for the Washington Times, 4-2-2010.]

From the moment we encounter Jimmy Cross and his bundle of letters from Martha, we have a sense that we know this guy, and this sense of familiarity deepens into intimacy even as we move with him through terrain and dangers unfamiliar to many of us because we get nearer and nearer to the truth of Martha that he carries—the Martha we come to know through Jimmy’s memories, regrets and often contradictory yearnings—“he wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once.” In a matter of a few paragraphs, we are deep in the hearts and minds of Jimmy, Kiowa, Henry Dobbins, Norman Bowker and several other very young men, deep in the heart of the thicketed landscaped of Vietnam and deep in the heartland of America, too.

These stories become our stories. We didn’t always know it, but these the stories of our lives.

In most of the reviews that greeted its publication in 1990, in many of the thousands of scholarly appraisals of the book written in the intervening 20 years, and in the countless editorials and blog posts responding to the republication of the book this year, The Things They Carried is cited as the best and truest book ever written about war. And yet “in a way, for me” said Tim O’Brien to that same caller to that radio show, “although on the surface, of course, it is a book about war, I’ve never thought of it, really, that way in my heart. Even when I was writing it, it seemed to be a book about storytelling and the burdens we all accumulate through our lives.”

This is a generous way to talk about a book you wrote because it opens the door to readers of all backgrounds, all experiences, just as the stories in the book give voice to soldiers’ stories, veteran’s stories, a schoolboy’s confession of his first crush, and the story of Linda, a nine-year-old girl who carries her secret story under a red stocking cap with a white tassel. “Even then,”writes O’Brien near the very end of the book, “at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones—that kind of love.” We hear the echo of Jimmy Cross with his eye fixed on a tunnel in Chu Lai and his mind on Martha. “He wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.” That kind of love. “Dense, crushing love.” And in the next moment, Ted Lavender is shot dead. And a few months after Tim’s first date, Linda dies. And we know these stories are not the same, but they are related, two parts of the same story, two more things they carried.

A lot of discussion and scholarship has been devoted to the question of exactly what this book is. Is it fiction? Is it history? Is it a novel? I’ve often tried to make some meaning of the arrangement of the stories, to see something in their structure. But lately, I’ve come to think that the truth might be simple; these stories are connected simply because they are next to each other. In fact, what I admire about this book is that Tim O’Brien never tries to hide the seams, never tries to sell us a cliché about happy endings or perfect unity or a moment in which everything can be understood. These are separate stories that stand alone, and they are stories can’t be separated, stories that belong together. Maybe the art of this book and the emotional truth of this book are the same—maybe this is about repairing a badly broken story, pasting it back together until the patchwork of portraits and the butterfly on a boy’s forehead and landscapes from Minnesota to My Khe is big enough to encompass all of us. This is not unlike the different way readers connect with this book, attaching themselves initially to one or two characters—maybe its Jimmy Cross or Kiowa or Ted Lavender you care about most, whose fate you worry over--but that interest, that hope inevitably connects you to everyone else.

In this way, this unlikely collection of stories invites us to tell our own stories, to connect ourselves and our experiences to the lives of these once-young men, living and dead. I hope this great citywide project to read this book, to have this book in common, will incite a lot of storytelling. And I hope today, many of you will tell us a story that connects you to Tim O’Brien’s stories.

I am mindful today of the stories I was told the first time I read the first story in this collection with a class of first-year college students. It was the early 1990s, and even then, no thematic reader or anthology of the best American stories was complete if it didn’t include The Things They Carried.

I was then teaching at Wheelock College in Boston, and the course was a first-year composition course—a required course because no freshmen in their right minds would have volunteered to renew their acquaintance with the rules of grammar and punctuation. It got worse. The class culminated in a writing proficiency exam—including a spelling test—which students had to pass in order to move on to sophomore year. You get: I desperately needed great stories I could dole out like sugar to make the medicine go down.

Early in the semester, I assigned The Things They Carried as homework. In class the next day, I tried to launch a literary analysis of the story. To a person, every student—they were all women—said she loved the story, but why was I asking so many questions about themes and characters? One of the braver souls said, “Isn’t all that sort of obvious?”

It was, of course. Tim O’Brien’s prose is crystal clear, and though his sentences carry a lot of emotional and psychological weight, the meaning is right there on the surface of his plain-spoken sentences. Nothing up his sleeve, no cryptic meanings hidden between the lines. This is literature of the highest order—not trumped out or dressed up but shockingly simple and achingly direct. So I ditched the analytical essay I had planned to assign them, and asked them instead, to write a story inspired by The Things They Carried.

I’ve taught hundreds of students and read thousands of essays and stories they’ve written, but to this day I remember many of the stories the students in that class read aloud to us the next week. One young woman wrote about waking up at 5 a.m. every day during high school to carry and deliver newspapers so she could pay part of the cost for her gymnastics classes. A young woman from Lowell began her story with the words, “I carried nothing to America.” She and her family had carried as much as they could from their home in Vietnam to a refugee camp, and when they finally secured passage on a crowded boat, they had to abandon everything they had risked their lives to carry from their home. And a very quiet and, I thought until that day, rather unengaged student began her very funny essay by apologizing for having had a pretty easy life compared to the guys in the book—“until I ended up in this class,” she added, “because I couldn’t pass a spelling test if my life depended on it.”

When he was interviewed last month for the website IdentityTheory.com. O’Brien was asked whether he thinks his books ought to be used to teach history. This gets us to one of the questions that has caused consternation since this book first appeared. Is it true? Is it real? Is it fact or fiction? Does the distinction matter? I think that distinction is worth discussing. “My books are taught in schools,” O’Brien said, “high schools and colleges—and there’s a tendency to over-politicize the books and use them almost as history lessons. It’s a bit like using The Sun Also Rises as a history lesson about the Lost Generation,” O’Brien explained. “It would be true in a way, but it would undermine the artistry of the book . . . Yeah, it’s a story . . . The history is a backdrop, and it’s all related,” O’Brien said, “but the true subject of the book—you know what it is when you close your eyes and think about the story.”

When I close my eyes and think about The Things They Carried, I always see Tim O’Brien on the Rainy River in a fourteen-foot boat with Elroy Berdhal, floating on the border, suspended between his past and future. And then I see Norman Bowker circling Sunset Park twelve times in his big Chevy on the Fourth of July and finally landing in middle of the lake—which is miles and years away from Vietnam, and yet it is the somehow the very same muddy water where Kiowa slipped down into the muck and died, the very muck Tim O’Brien revisits twenty years later, where he wades out to the middle--his ten-year old daughter Kathleen on one dry bank, and a wary Vietnamese farmer on the not-too-distant dike—and he is still right there in the middle of the Rainy River, on the border between his past and his future, in the middle of life and death.

It almost makes sense. It almost seems to come together. But when I open my eyes, I see what is missing. Norman Bowker with a jump rope around his neck. And Mark Fossie’s girlfriend Mary Anne Bell, who traveled from Cleveland to LA to Bangkok to Saigon to Chu Lai to the perimeter camp of the Green Berets and finally walked off into the mountains and did not come back. And that water buffalo that Rat Kiley literally shot to pieces.

These, too, are the stories we all carry. These are our stories, too.

How much do we want to know? How much can we carry?

“Daddy, tell the truth,” Kathleen can say.

This exchange between Tim O’Brien and his daughter ends the very short story “Good Form,” a tough little story that begins with an assertion. “It’s time to be blunt,” writes O’Brien. “I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented.”

And then his ten-year old daughter asks a simple question. “Did you ever kill anybody?”

I think Kathleen speaks for a lot of readers. I think that while we are reading these stories and admiring these stories, many of us find ourselves wondering if Tim O’Brien killed anybody. Maybe we hope he will be spared the burden of having to carry that for the rest of his life. Or maybe we want to spare ourselves.

“Daddy, tell the truth,” Kathleen can say. “Did you ever kill anybody?”

And, O’Brien writes, I can say, honestly, “Of course not.”

Or I can say, honestly, “Yes.”

I wonder—and this is a genuine question—is that an answer we can live with?

Reflections on the Vietnam War

The Things *We* Carry

Somerville Reads committee member Jodi had an interesting idea: why not get people to talk about the items they carry around? Sure, we're not in a war zone (although it can seem like it when you're in Boston rush-hour traffic), but we all have distinctive assortments of items we carry around for reasons that may range from the practical to the irrational. So, Jodi asked people to come by Sherman Market, weigh what they have on their person and talk about it. Two friends of Jodi's, Anna and Meg, thought this sounded like an interesting project and graciously agreed to help.


















Meg diligently took notes on all the participant interviews.

Full disclosure: I (Kevin, a library staff member) came with my shoulder bag, which usually has books (3.01 pounds or thereabouts) my passport (only piece of ID with my full name on it--besides, if I decide to leave the country on a whim, I'd rather not stop by my apartment) and pen and tiny notebook (I'm often jotting things down).

Here's what other people had to say who came to Sherman Market on Sunday April 11, to talk about their day-t0-day gear.

Here Andrea puts her whole bag down on the scale. Total weight: 8.6 lbs.














In her bag she had a sketchbook diary ("In case I'm ever moved to draw," she said), chapstick, books, cell phone and a flashlight (which she said came in handy quite recently).

And here Andrea proudly shows off her Somerville Reads button:

















One man who asked to go unidentified showed us a police baton that he always carries with him. He found it on a street in Roxbury two weeks after being mugged. It weighs 0.8 lbs:



















Anna's bag weighed 3.18 pounds:





















The biggest surprise inside? "I carry corks around, in case I want to practice juggling:"













Jodi herself got in on the act. Her hemp bag weighed 2.61 lbs. Of the items inside, her journal was the clear favorite:





















"I write down lists and appointments and phone numbers and people to send postcards to and sometimes I write personal stuff in it but then I obscure it with colorful designs. This particular notebook has been to North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylavnia, New York, Massachusetts, and back and forth across the country with me twice."

One participant always keeps this key chain with her:




















She said, "This keychain says LOVE on it. A friend got it for me when I was in middle school. She got it in the New Dehli airport and she bought it because it reminded her of me."

A woman who asked not to be identified put a binder she had with her on the scale and found out it weighed 9.77 lbs. She said, "I'm a therapist and these are client files and paper work -- all the information about the lives, children they have... They're heavy, emotionally and physically. I think it's good to revisit why I'm acutally holding on to these things right now. I'm carrying fifty people's hearts and souls and pains and grief. "

And lastly, someone decided to weigh a person he carries around with him:



















This young man weighs 26.3 lbs. Derrick, his father, said, "26 pounds is a lot to carry, especially when you're moving around a lot."

The Things We Carry made for a really fun and fascinating afternoon.

A special thanks to Sherman Market owners and staff for letting us use the space!

Sherman Cafe Discussion Group

SPL would like to thank everyone who came to Sherman Cafe last Thursday night to discuss The Things They Carried. We had a lively, thoughtful discussion.

We would also like to thank Sherman Cafe and their staff for hosting the event.

Recap of Saturday's discussion group

Saturday's book discussion group was a tremendous success. Thank you to all the special folks who joined us and shared your thoughts on The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien, and the Vietnam War. We had a lot of different perspectives represented, from Veterans to war protesters, which made for a very meaningful discussion. A huge thank you to Michael Downing as well, our discussion moderator, who created a respectful and thought-provoking atmosphere for our thoughts to be shared. Enjoy the pictures from the afternoon, below.

Michael Downing, our moderator

While I have you here, next up is an all-day Vietnam film festival, happening at the Central Library this Saturday, April 24, from 9:30-4:45. We will screen 3 films, Good Morning Vietnam, The Quiet American, and Born on the 4th of July. We hope to see you there!

Pictures from Porter Square Books

We are happy to report the discussion group at Porter Square Books was a great success! Many thanks to all who came out and to the bookstore for providing these pictures and supporting Somerville Reads.

Margot Livesey led a great discussion

Nice to see folks chatting after the discussion

Discussion Group with Margot Livesey @ Porter Square Books

We are pleased to have Margot Livesey moderate a discussion group for Somerville Reads. Livesey's novels include Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, Homework, and The House on Fortune Street. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Born in Scotland, she lives in Cambridge and teaches at Emerson College.

The discussion group will take place at Porter Square Books this Tuesday April 13, starting at 7:00 pm. We hope you can join us for a great program!

Vietnam War lecture pictures

Many thanks to Harvard Professor Hue-Tam Ho Tai for an insightful lecture on the Vietnam War and experiences of the Vietnamese people during the conflict. Also, thanks to all who attended and helped make this a successful event.

Here are some pictures from the evening.

Somerville Reads Is Underway

Thanks to all who attended our first kickoff for Somerville Reads last Sunday at Arts at the Armory. We had about 100 people in attendance and were so happy to see a great variety of folks representing our great city of Somerville. Here are some pictures of the event, which was a huge success!

The Band That Time Forgot


The dance floor...




View from the balcony...

A Brief History of the Vietnam War

We are pleased to host Harvard Professor Hue-Tam Ho Tai at the Central Library this Thursday, April 1 at 7:00 p.m., for a talk on the Vietnam War. She will discuss the experiences of Vietnamese on all sides of the conflict from a very unique perspective. The lecture will also be accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. Hue-Tam Ho Tai is the Kenneth T. Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese History at Harvard University. Please join us for this exciting and informative lecture on the Vietnam War.

New Novel on Vietnam War

A new novel has just arrived that deserves a worthy mention. Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, is Karl Marlantes' first novel. Thirty years in the making, this novel makes a grand entrance into the genre of Vietnam War fiction. To reserve a copy from the library, click here.

Booklist
Due to the efforts of such soldier-writers as James Webb and Tim O'Brien, the Vietnam novel has come of age, and this is a worthy addition to the genre. Marlantes, a former marine who was awarded the Navy Cross in Vietnam, sets his debut in Quang-Tri Province, at an American fire-support base. The environment is painted in vivid, intense hues: the fog malevolent, the bugs and leeches constant torturers, and jungle rot universal. The enemy is always near and often unseen until firefights explode with shocking savagery. But this novel isn't flawless. The major characters fill traditional roles: the young, inexperienced lieutenant; his grizzled, tough sergeant; and the cowardly griper. The contempt shown by the soldiers for the supposedly uncaring brass and politicians often seems over the top. Still, the characters are, if traditional, certainly believable. This tough, unsentimental saga is filled with frightened men; most endure and achieve a certain nobility in spite of themselves. An engrossing chronicle of men at war.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2009 Booklist

Publishers Weekly
Thirty years in the making, Marlantes's epic debut is a dense, vivid narrative spanning many months in the lives of American troops in Vietnam as they trudge across enemy lines, encountering danger from opposing forces as well as on their home turf. Marine lieutenant and platoon commander Waino Mellas is braving a 13-month tour in Quang-Tri province, where he is assigned to a fire-support base and befriends Hawke, older at 22; both learn about life, loss, and the horrors of war. Jungle rot, leeches dropping from tree branches, malnourishment, drenching monsoons, mudslides, exposure to Agent Orange, and wild animals wreak havoc as brigade members face punishing combat and grapple with bitterness, rage, disease, alcoholism, and hubris. A decorated Vietnam veteran, the author clearly understands his playing field (including military jargon that can get lost in translation), and by examining both the internal and external struggles of the battalion, he brings a long, torturous war back to life with realistic characters and authentic, thrilling combat sequences. Marlantes's debut may be daunting in length, but it remains a grand, distinctive accomplishment. (Apr.) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.

A Conversation with Tim O'Brien

On Wednesday, March 24, 2010, Tim O'Brien took part in a discussion with seniors at Washington D.C.'s Cardozo High School to commemorate the 20th anniversary of The Things They Carried. Iraq Veteran and author Nate Fick (One Bullet Away) moderated the conversation, and read additional questions submitted by students across the country. Over 300 schools broadcast the event live.

An archived version of the event will be available here on Monday March 29, 2010.*

He was also interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered. That interview will be available online at approximately 6pm this evening. To listen, click here.

*Info is courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books

Somerville Reads Kicks Off This Sunday!

We are super excited about our kick off event this Sunday, March 28, at Arts at the Armory! The event will be from 4-8pm and there is a lot to look forward to: Vietnam war-era music by The Band That Time Forgot, free food, dancing, and socialzing with community friends. We hope you will spread the word and bring your family and friends with you as we celebrate Somerville Reads!

Arts at the Armory is located at 191 Highland Ave in Somerville. For directions and parking information, please click here.

Have you picked up a copy of The Things They Carried yet? Copies are available for loan at all three libraries in Somerville, including books-on-cd. You can also request them online using your library card. Porter Square Books also has copies for sale, if you'd like to have your own copy. Other goodies to look for - buttons, bookmarks, and a program of events - are all available at the library.

Tim O'Brien in Harvard Square This Week

Tim O'Brien will be speaking at the First Parish Church Meetinghouse this Thursday, March 25, at 7:00 pm. The event is hosted by the Harvard Book Store and tickets are $5.00.

For more information, click here.

Additional Resources

We hope you are interested in pursuing further resources inspired by The Things They Carried. Included below is a link to a pathfinder to get you started. There are numerous directions to go into with the subject of Vietnam, so keep in mind this is only a start. All resources listed on the pathfinder are available at the Central Somerville library and when listed, at the East and West branches as well. Please feel free to print out the list and bring it with you to the library. Hard copies of the pathfinder will also be available at the library.

If you would rather work online, there are live links on the left hand side of this blog for easy searching and requesting. We hope these lists will be useful and give you another way to connect to Somerville Reads and The Things They Carried.

To view the Vietnam Pathfinder, click here.

Event Schedule

Here are the events we have planned so far. Stay tuned for updates!

• March 28, 2010, Arts at the Armory (191 Highland Ave), 4:00pm: Program Kick-off, including free food and festive war-era music by The Band That Time Forgot
• April 1 - April 30, Central Library Auditorium: Somerville high school student art exhibit, in response to the themes of war, the Vietnam war, and The Things They Carried
  
• April 1, 2010, Central Library, 7:00 pm: Lecture on the history and culture of Vietnam by Harvard Professor Hue-Tam Ho Tai
• April 5, 2010, Central Library Auditorium, 4:00 pm: Opening reception for Somerville high school student art exhibit
  
• April 8, 2010, East Branch Library (115 Broadway), 7:00 pm: Community read-aloud from The Things They Carried
• April 11, 2010, Sherman Market (22 Union Square), 2:00 pm: Sherman Market invites you to share what you carry in your bag. Come weigh your bags and discuss the items they contain
  
• April 13, 2010, Porter Square Books (25 White Street), 7:00 pm: Book discussion led by author Margot Livesey
• April 15, 2010, Sherman Cafe (257 Washington Street), 7:00 pm: Book discussion group at Sherman Cafe's local coffee shop atmosphere
  
• April 17, 2010, Central Library, 2:00 pm: Book discussion led by Tufts English Professor Michael Downing, titled Stories Can Save Us - We'll briefly review the book's history and its influential place in classrooms, engage each other's personal responses, and entertain wide-ranging speculation and questions about the inventive structure and elusive truth of this haunting book.
• April 24, 2010, Central Library: Film Festival, featuring "Good Morning Vietnam," "The Quiet American," and "Born on the 4^th of July."

Somerville Reads Kickoff 3/28/10

We hope you will join us for the first Somerville Reads kickoff event on Sunday March 28 at Arts at the Armory from 4-8pm. We are thrilled to have The Band That Time Forgot as our special guest, for an evening of Vietnam War era music and celebration. The event is free, refreshments will be provided, and all are welcome to attend. Tell your friends, bring your family, and come party with us!

Why you should read The Things They Carried

There are so many reasons why Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is the perfect book for our first community reading program. If you are curious about why we chose this book or just curious what the buzz is about, here are some things to know about The Things They Carried:

• First published in 1990, The Things They Carried is regarded as the quintessential fictional work about the Vietnam War. The novel is composed of 22 individual stories, but also combines aspects of memoir, novel and short story collections. This is a book that is easy to read, easy to pick up when you have time, and easy to revisit again and again.

• The novel is narrated in first person by a writer and combat veteran of the Vietnam War. He tells us soldier's stories - who they were before the draft, how they fought, and how they coped when they returned home. In its essence, these are stories of soldiers coming home and learning to live in the world again - learning to feel human again, learning not to be afraid, and learning to forgive.

• The Things They Carried is a war story and as such, socially relevant to us now in 2010. The novel offers a lot to be reflected upon - spiritual, emotional, and psychological burdens that we all carry with us. Tim O'Brien has often said that the title is meant to go beyond just soldiers and the war to the human race in general. As a war story, there are several haunting and graphic scenes. We hope the opportunity to read these stories will increase your awareness and respect for all our soldiers, both veterans and men and women in active duty. We also hope these stories will make you pause to reflect on the things you carry.
  

• Finally, The Things They Carried is also a novel about writing. The narrator and the characters in the novel often reflect on the process of storytelling and writing itself. We hope the wonderful depth this novel offers will give everyone something to cherish in reading this book.
  

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the novel. Here is a look at the 1990 cover and the new anniversary edition:

On the Same Page

This spring Somerville is launching its first "one city, one book" campaign, a community read project in which people all over the City will read and discuss the same book. The book that has been selected is The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, a collection of related stories about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. A variety of events and exhibits are being planned in venues throughout the City beginning in late March and continuing through April. More information about this exciting program is on the way. Stay tuned!