Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling

So this is Harry Potter, eh? Okay. Not bad, not bad. But not great. Certainly not great. I'm not exactly

sure why so many people are so enamored with this book, even a decade or so after its first publication. It's engaging and all, but...

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

I was deeply touched by this series of essays about the author's time in the Vietnam War. He grapples

with really big ideas, ideas that I hadn't thought of -- perhaps because his life story and mine are so different. I don't think we started out that dissimilar: good at school, a future of our own choosing. The difference is, he got drafted and I will never have to face that reality. It differs even from my father's story; he, who volunteered for the Air Force at the same time, both to avoid the combat O'Brien writes about and to see the world. His big story from the war involves the amount of effort and sweat it took to climb to the top of his bunk in Vietnam's oppressive heat. A far cry from O'Brien's story about killing a man. Then again, did he kill a man? That's the wonderful part about the book. It makes clear the difficulty of telling fact from fiction when confronted with such memories. Though the same might be true for all of us.