The Forever War

Dexter Filkins


The military prism is an important way to view a war but not the only way. Written by a journalist, this book paints a picture of Iraq over the course of the war in snapshots, chapter by chapter. This book is difficult to read for the sheer truth it reveals in an almost painfully unembelished account of what has transpired in Iraq. It is a kind of raw exposure, experienced by the author and shared with the reader.


"In Afghanistan, the brutality and the humor went hand in hand; the knife with the tender flesh. There seemed no collapse of their fortunes in which the Afghans could not find some reason to laugh." Pg. 24


"Iraq was filled with people like Yacob. They weren't survivors as much as they were leftovers. The ruined byproducts of terrible times." Pg. 72


"There were always two conversations in Iraq, the one the Iraqis were having with the Americans and the one they were having among themselves. The one the Iraqis were having with us - that was positive and predictable and boring, and it made the Americans happy because it made them think they were winning. And the Iraqis kept it up because it kept the money flowing, or because it bought them a little peace. The conversation they were having with each other was what really mattered, of course. That conversation was the chatter of a whole other world, a parallel reality, which sometimes unfolded right next to the Americans, even right in front of them. And we almost never saw it." Pg. 115


"But there was nothing like facing death to feel it in the flesh. It was as if Omohundro wore a mask, and with that mask he gave everyone more courage than they knew they had. The trick was never showing fear." Pg. 191


"It was a joke among the marines posted there, 'the government center,' since there wasn't much of either. The center of the city was obliterated and the government had ceased to exist." Pg. 296 [referring to Ramadi]


"Whatever the motives of the people who expelled Hanoon, the effect on his own views seemed lasting and deep. His brian was turning. As he packed his belongings and prepared to leave his ancestral home, Hanoon said, not a single one of his Sunni neighbors stopped by to say goodbye. 'It's in their genes,' Hanoon said. 'It's a disease. They hate the Shiites. I don't think things will ever go back to normal between Shiites and Sunnis.'" Pg. 320


Book 75

The Graveyard Book

By Neil Gaiman


Book 74

Current Stash of Library Books

Library is closed until Jan 3rd so I had to stock up on books!



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The City of Bones

By Cassandra Clare


YA fiction about a young girl discovering herself and the surprising world of not magic she didn't know existed. This is a very entertaining story with two more books to the series. An easy but thought provoking read exploring friendship, family loyalty, love, honor, truth and growing up. 


I am now following the YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) and this series was in the top ten when they came out (along with Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, etc.). 


I am reading books off this list:
http://www.ala.org/yalsa/booklists/bbya 


Book 73

The Intuitionists

By Colson Whitehead

Another wonderful, indescribable book by Colson Whitehead. 

". . . 'eccentric' being a word, Lila Mae notes dryly, that white people use to describe crazy white people of stature." Pg. 83

"She has not seen any of the other guests but can imagine them. The city's tidal forces wash the weak-treading citizens out here, to the edge to pitiless crags like the Friendly League Residence. Old men in gray clothes with beards like dead grass, stooped and shuffling. The alibiless. Jagged coughing haunted the halls last night, stealing out of multiple rooms, a sodden death-chorus." Pg. 185

"It's all bright and all the weight and cares you have been shedding are no longer weight and cares but brightness. Even the darkness of the shaft is gone because there is no disagreement between you and the shaft. How an you breathe when you no longer have lungs? The question does not perturb, that last plea of rationality has fallen away floors ago, with the earth. No time, no time for one last thought, what was the last thing I thought last night before i fell asleep, the very last thought, what was it, because before you can think that thought everything is bright and you have fallen away in the perfect elevator." Pg 223

"That she was a citizen of the city to come and that the frail devices she had devoted her life to were weak and would all fall one day like Number Eleven. All of them, plummeting down the shafts like beautiful dead stars." Pg 255

Book 72

The Virgin Suicides

By Jeffrey Eugenides


At once a funny parable about suburbia and a sad story of the casualties of it, the is a wonderful story about kids coming of age in modern, empty suburbia. As I found in Middlesex, Eugenides writes nimbly, weaving a compelling story told with grace and precision.                                                                                       


"We were amazed our parents permitted this, when lawn jobs usually justified calling the cops. But now Mr. Bates didn't scream o r try to get the truck's license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips - they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they believed in, and that for all their care taking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns." Pg. 55


"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together." Pg. 249


Book 71

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I have been interested in Russia lately, the prisons in particular and the whole era of the gulags. This book is an essential read in the genre. The author literally chronicles one day of the prisoner Ivan Denisovich. Jimmy described it as claustrophobic. I agree, in so much that it is confined (a necessary feature of prison literature), but also condensed, which is not usually characteristic of prison literature since the long expanse of time is often being emphasized. Solzhenitsyn doesn't emphasize the brutality or horrific conditions within which the prisoners live or the common inexplicable reason why they are there; instead, both the injustice of being there and the inhumane conditions under which you live in a daily basis are so normal, so impossible to fight that to survive you just have to accept it and take each of the daily challenges that come your way in stride. Just as Ivan does.

Book 70

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Zone One

By Colson Whitehead


This book is difficult to describe or categorize. It could be seen as science fiction and/or dystopic fiction. Ok, its a zombie book. But don't let that fool you. Whiteheads writing is an incredible experience. His language is playful and clever without trying to be either one. His words brought me great joy, he is a writer I will be following. 


The story itself takes place in a kind of post-apocalyptic setting. In this backdrop of the loss of everything humans have invented and all of human history, a unique window opens to look at the sublime and absurd world we have created. 


"He remembered how things used to be, the customs of the skyline. Up and down the island the buildings collided, they humiliated runts through verticality and ambition, sulked in one another's shadows. Inevitability was mayor, term after term. Yesterdays old masters, stately named and midwifed by once-famous architects, were insulted by the soot of combustion engines and by technological advances in construction. Time chiseled at elegant stonework, which swirled or plummeted to the sidewalk in dust and chips and chunks. Behind the facades their insides were butchered, reconfigured, rewired according to the next era's new theories of utility." Pg 6


"Once inside, the unit wplit up and he swept solo through the workstations. The office furniture was hypermodern and toylike, for for an app garage or a graphic design firm keen on sketching the future. The surfaces of the desks were thick and transparent, hacked out of plastic and elevating the curvilinear monitors and keyboards in dioramas of productivity. The empty ergonomic chairs posed like amiable spiders, whispering a multiplicity of comfort and lumbar massage." Pg. 11-13


"A society manufactures the heroes it requires." Pg. 42


"The last time he was his childhood home was on Last Night. It, too, had looked normal from the outside, in that new meaning of normal that signified resemblance to the time before the flood. Normal meant 'the past.' Normal was the unbroken idyll of life before.The present was a series of intervals differentiated from each other only by the degree of dread they contained. The future? The future was the clay in their hands." Pg. 65


"The soldiers took longer rest breaks, devising new branches of gallows humor, jokes that took root. They knew they were being fundamentally altered, in their very cells, inducted into a different class of trauma than the rest of the survivors. Semper fi. Then they went inside." Pg. 77


"The insomniac's brutal scenario had become the encompassing reality across the planet. There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth, and it was precisely this thought of final, irrevocable isolation that united them all. Even if they didn't know it." Pg. 87


"Everyone he saw walked around with a psychological limp, with a collapsed shoulder here or a disobedient, half-shut eyelid there, and the current favorite, the all-over crumpling, as if the soul were imploding or the mind sucking the extremities into itself.  . . Anyone with perfect posture was faking it, overcompensating for entrenched trauma." Pg. 92


"He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don't do it." Pg. 179


Book 69

The Magicians

By Lev Grossman


Aptly described as a postadolescent Harry Potter, the main character of the book struggles with a similar series of events leading him into the surprising world of magic. A world of magic with less clarity between good and evil, with not so heroic (nor sometimes likeable) heros, and with a story that is all together adult and in a strange way for a book of this title realistic. Surprising and delightful, an excellent read.


Book 68

The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival

By Sara Tuvel Bernstein

Sara Bernstein is independent, strong-willing, nurturing, wItty. And she tells a beautiful and horrific story of her life growing up pre-WWII and then as she watched her world unravel as the Germans strong armed themselves across Europe. It is an important story - the voices of women have been too small coming out of the nightmare of the ghettos and concentration camps. For her and her three female relatives, they entered the camps together and would not let each other go. They looked out for each other, shared food, used each of their own strengths to help the group stay alive. This was truly a unique accomplishment in such a chaotic and brutal environment. A beautiful and important story.


Book 67