Readings for 02/04/18

I really enjoyed Jim Shepard’s “The Gun Lobby” & “The Mortality of Parents,” Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t,” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” and Richard Bausch’s “The Fireman’s Wife.”  “The Gun Lobby” was a great story that took turns I never saw coming.  When you first start reading it, you would have never suspected that the narrator had been taken hostage for days by his beyond stressed wife.  There are many humorous moments between Sandy and the narrator, and many moments of the narrator realizing how he could have been a better husband, friend, etc.  It is a story of two people somehow finding their way to each other, even at the very end, because when the police bust in to end the hostage situation, the narrator is holding onto his wife and goes down with her.  “The Things They Carried” was a good war story.  It adequately captured how it could possibly be out in the field of battle, the desensitization that occurs to seeing death.  Getting lost in fantasies of home, the only things keeping you anchored in some sense of a real reality.  The listing of all the equipment and its weight was creating a theme I’m aware, but I found it to be a little much at times.  The story “We Didn’t” has been one of my favorite for quite some time.  I like how Dybek tells the story we all can relate to, our first love back in our high school days.  He perfectly captures the descriptions of the awkwardness between two young would-be lovers, as well as the eventual drifting we sadly experience with more people than whom we stay close with.  The scene of when the deceased pregnant woman washed ashore was an especially great scene as well.  This is because it was a great depiction of being able to paint an over the top, high emotion scene, without using the accompanying language one would expect in such a situation.  Dybek doesn’t allow “hot language” to play here, and very plainly describes the happenings of the police’s discovery.  He even uses the crudeness of one of the cop’s reactions to break the tension for the reader, which is a genius move in my opinion.  “We Didn’t” will continue to be one of my favorite short stories, being an example of some of the elements I hope to aim for in my own short story creations.