“The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, is considered among the best–if not the best–work of fiction to come out of the Vietnam War. After reading it, I must concur. It is some kind of masterpiece. It’s been two weeks since I finished the book, and I still think about it.

You haven’t read anything like this book. It reads like a memoir, written in first person by Tim O’Brien. The book is dedicated to “the men of Alpha Company,” and then he names them–the same characters as in the book. And yet, the title page (not the cover) says, “A work of fiction by Tim O’Brien.” The characters in the book are, I’m assuming, the same people O’Brien actually served with in Vietnam. But here, he’s making up stories about them, inventing a whole different reality, rewriting his own history. Or is he?

How much is actual memoir, and how much is made up? Only O’Brien can tell us that, I suppose. In the book, he references the book “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” his own actual memoir of serving in Vietnam. Early on, he tells a fascinating story about getting his draft notice, and coming close to crossing into Canada. Was that all made up, or was it based on at least some truth?

So in that respect, it’s a somewhat discombobulating book. What is real? What is based on reality? What is just totally invented?

The book has no plot. Rather, it is a series of stories, usually not involving combat. In places, O’Brien the character muses about the role of war stories, how it keeps alive the memory of men killed in action.

And he kept circling back to the same stories. He’d tell a story in one chapter, and a couple chapters later, while telling another story, he would allude back to the earlier one and fill in some information he didn’t tell before. Then a few chapters later, he might come back to the same story from yet another angle. This happened over and over, giving cohesiveness to the book’s somewhat disjointed tales.

The writing itself is beautiful. In one place, he talks about going on night patrols.

“It was the purest black you could imagine…the kind of clock-stopping black that God must’ve had in mind when he sat down to invent blackness. It made your eyeballs ache. You’d shake your head and blink, except you couldn’t even tell you were blinking, the blackness didn’t change. So pretty soon you’d get jumpy. Your nerves would go. You’d start to worry about getting cut off from the rest of the unit–alone, you’d think–and then the real panic would bang in and you’d reach out and try to touch the guy in front of you, groping for his shirt, hoping to Christ he was still there. It made for some bad dreams.

This is a book I highly recommend. It is captivating, it is surreal, it is off-putting. It is altogether masterful.

Today I finished Robert Ludlum’s 2000 book, “The Prometheus Deception.” At 650 pages, it’s the longest novel I’ve read in quite a while. But it was worth it.

I read every Robert Ludlum book up through 1990’s “The Bourne Ultimatum.” Then I stopped. He continued writing books, using his signature three-word titles–The Scorpio Illusion, The Apocalypse Watch, The Materese Countdown, The Sigma Protocol, and Prometheus–plus one called The Road to Omaha, which followed The Bourne Ultimatum. But I hadn’t read any of them. Don’t know why. I guess I moved on to other stuff, even though a Ludlum book never failed to thrill.

Ludlum died in 2001. Eric Van Lustbader finished four more Ludlum novels, and then started a series about Jason Bourne under the Ludlum brand which now has four books.

A couple months ago I read a book in the Covert One series, another series under the Ludlum brand but not written by him. It reminded me of how much I liked Ludlum’s novels. I decided to go back and catch up.

“The Prometheus Deception” was standard Ludlum: a lone hero teams up with a female accomplice to battle a dasturdly conspiracy, with plot twists and betrayals galore. I’m glad I rediscovered Ludlum. I’ve got some more catching up to do. Just wish he didn’t write such doggone long books!

I took both of these books on vacation last week. Patterson books read quickly, with all those short chapters free of descriptive fluff. They just move right along. Good vacation reading.

“Double Cross” is another winner in the Alex Cross series, which Patterson writes himself. He creates very dasturdly villains. In this book we’ve got two–the Audience Killer, and Kyle Craig, a villain from a previous book who’s been in a Supermax prison for years. This book comes to a conclusion which, for me, was unexpected but satisfying.

Patterson, like Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy, has branded himself. A stable of other writers do books under the Patterson label, and they closely follow the Patterson style. “Sail” is better than good, but it’s not great. It’s very good. Or pretty good. I enjoyed it. I “sailed” right along. Started it the last day of vacation (last Sunday), but didn’t finish it until Tuesday. I thought it was headed toward a predictable ending, but it took a sudden detour, and I appreciated that.

Kem Meyer is the Communications Director at Granger Community Church near South Bend, Ind. It’s a fast-growing church with a laser focus on reaching lost people. A very innovative place. And Kem Meyer is a very innovative person who enjoys the cutting edge. She is doing some original (at least it seems that way) thinking about how we communicate in the church. 

I’ve been familiar with Kem for several years now. I attended her seminar at MinistryCOM 2006, heard her keynote address at MinistryCOM 2007, and attended a full-day seminar by her at Granger. And I’ve been reading her blog for several years. 

The book resembles her blog in ways–a bunch of short pieces, most of which can stand on their own. In fact, I recognized some of the content from her blog. 

In 1995, I wrote “A Plain and Simple Guide to Church Promotion” as my project in completing a Masters in Public Relations at Ball State U. I gathered absolutely everything I could find about any aspect of local church promotion–newsletters, advertising, branding, design, printing, Powerpoint, font usage, and much more. In all, over 100 individual topics. Each topic filled a single page, and I mostly just gave bullet points–simple tips, do’s and don’ts. 

Kem’s book is similar. She doesn’t go in-depth into anything, but hits a lot of different areas. If you want direction, she gives you more than enough to work with, but she doesn’t overload you. Which is part of the book’s point–that we need to make life easier for people by lessening the clutter and noise.

People today are barraged with information and choices. Kem writes, “People who live in today’s world respond in one of three ways: they become overwhelmed and shut down, they labor over whether they’re making the right decisions, or they just ignore you and move on.”

So that’s important to keep in mind as we communicate in the local church–between ourselves, and with outsiders (or, in PR-speak, with our internal and external constituencies). She emphasizes keeping it simple. Don’t complicate people’s lives. Help them sort through the clutter. And don’t add to the clutter with stuff you think is important, but which they couldn’t care less about.

That’s an overview of the book. Follow the link below for some quotes.

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