Welcome to Litsy!

#bookspin #june2023 #reading1001

I am posting one book per day from my extensive to-be-read collection. No description and providing no reason for wanting to read it, I just do. Some will be old, and some will be new. Don‘t judge me - I have a lot of books. Join in if you want!

#ABookaDay2023

Thanks to all who served and continued to serve ♥️ @TheBookHippie here‘s my dad. Coincidentally, his birthday was yesterday 💔 Tagged book is one he asked me to buy him (for Christmas I think) years ago. He‘d watch and read things about Vietnam, but would never talk about it.

#Movie2BookRecs @Klou
Prompt: Full Metal Jacket

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ What kind of mad man voluntarily goes in theater during a vicious war? Dumbfounded soldiers & marines often asked this of Michael Herr. As a war correspondent for Esquire, he went not just to the periphery, but into the viscera of 1968 Vietnam. These are war stories in the raw; from Herr himself & the very servicemen who lived the tales, many of whom had trouble distinguishing between their love of service & contempt for the Vietnam War.

Vietnam:

“But you could fly up and into hot tropic sunsets that would change the way you thought about light forever. You could also fly out of places that were so grim they turned to black and white in your head five minutes after you‘d gone.”

$1.30 on Amazon dot com

@arubabookwoman

I first ready this many years ago and it stayed with me. It‘s all about a journo during the Vietnam war and the effects this had on the soldiers themselves....only 99p on kindle at the moment

Thinking of my grandfather today, and where my research has taken me this year, and how much we still have to learn from our own history. #memorialday

#War #ReadingResolutions

Thanks for the tag @Marchpane ! These are my short-term #fivestarpredictions. I'm stingy with my five ⭐️s!

@Jess7 @vivastory @Bookzombie @JenP - I'd love to see yours if you wish to participate. 😊

Out on the street I couldn‘t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The Sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn‘t even have to fuse. The war primed you for lame years while rock and roll turned more lurid and dangerous than bullfighting, rock stars started falling like second lieutenants; ecstasy and death and (of course and for sure) life.

This is one of those books that will probably live somewhere in the back of my mind until I die. Beautiful and hideous, tender and cruel, harrowing in its honesty. Not an easy read, but a visceral, unforgettable one. It will change how you think about life, death, war, peace, humanity. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I've read 50 pages of this book and it's already chewed me up a little bit. #nonfiction #militaryhistory #dispatches #vietnam

#aprilbookshowers Day 11 - #setinsoutheastasia
Well it looks like books set in Southeast Asia are lacking on my bookshelf. 😕 This book was the only one I found - nonfiction that takes place in Vietnam. This is my boyfriend's book that he had to read for class with more of his class books behind it.

Finally got my writing chair reupholstered, so now there's no excuse for not being productive ✍🏻 #writing

I remember reading this book as a schoolboy, probably in 1979 or 1980, when Apocalypse Now was first released, and becoming obsessed with the Vietnam War. Herr's memoirs, in his hypnotic prose, simultaneously appalled and enchanted me, and that throwaway line, "I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods" sparked a certain zeitgeist among us, disenfranchised yet also over-privileged (though we didn't recognise that then).

I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don‘t know what a media freak is until you‘ve seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, ...getting their pimples shot off for the networks.

"You don't have to be a seasoned tactician to know your ass is cold."

And straight into Michael Herr's "Dispatches."

R.I.P. Michael Herr.

RIP Michael Herr, who wrote this and the film based on it, Full Metal Jacket. This is one of those books I've been meaning to get around to, because Herr is cited as an influence in so much of the reporting I love.