May 12, 2001
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

BCDC's rating for this book was 3.8.

The menu for this meeting was homemade pizzas with three different kinds of doughs to choose from, various salads along with tres leches cake and chocolate pistachio spirals for dessert.

The BCDC Reading Guide for The Things They Carried is below.

• Have you ever been an Elroy Berdahl to someone, or had someone be an Elroy Berdahl to you? (On the Rainy River)
• Would you have gone? Or would you have come back from Canada?
• Which chapter was most striking to you and why?
• Did reading this inform or influence your understanding of the news about Bob Kerrey and his Vietnam experience?
• Do you think O'Brien would trade his stories for Canada?
• Compare this to other war stories and/or war movies such as Saving Private Ryan. What different messages/attitudes do they promote about warfare? Compare the shapes of the character and story arcs.
• Was the fictionalization fair to the other people O'Brien was in Vietnam with?
• The book seems to disagree with itself about the importance of truth. An early story say that it's very important that stories be true. A later story says that the stories are "truer than true." So does truth matter in war stories? How can this be reconciled?
• What was the point of writing a fictionalized memoir?