So, a week ago I had my 8-year blogiversary. It’s hard to believe that it has been eight years since I launched EDIWTB on a whim, inspired by blogging as a medium and a desire to marry it with my love of reading. In the blogging world, eight years is pretty long. When I launched the blog, there weren’t that many book bloggers out there. Now, there are thousands of us. But there aren’t a lot of us who have been around for 8 years and have kept at it, and I am proud to say that I am still here. I don’t read nearly as much as a lot of other bloggers, and my post frequency waxes and wanes, but I am still here, reading when I can.
A few stats: in eight years I have posted 872 times, read 317 books, gone to BEA 5 or 6 times, and enjoyed countless conversations with other book lovers in person and online, in comments and on Twitter and Facebook, and loved every second of it. And then, of course, there’s the bookstore in my house, stocked with review copies that publishers have been kind enough to send me.
Here’s to eight more years!
And now to today’s review: Redeployment, by Phil Klay. Redeployment is a collection of stories about life as soldier in Iraq. They are told from a range of perspectives: chaplain, infantry, corpse corps (the people who collect the bodies after attacks), civilian. Some of them take place in Iraq or right after vets have returned home and are trying to re-enter civilian life, while some take place years after the war.
I’ll be honest: I don’t know a whole lot about the military, and a lot of the acronyms and various roles within the whole Iraq operation were unfamiliar to me. I am drawn to fiction about the Iraq war – such a departure from the usual domestic fiction that I read – in part because it is such unfamiliar territory, and because I feel a duty to understand that world and get in the heads of these men who are so far removed from my daily life. Klay did a really incredible job of conveying what they were thinking and what got them through the days in Iraq. His characters are realistic, not noble and singular of mission, but flawed and complex. Klay’s writing is both immensely readable and also breathtakingly powerful. He seamlessly moves from quite disturbing wartime scenes to internal, emotional exploration within a couple of paragraphs, conveying the many layers of complication in our conflict in that troubled area.
A few stories in Redeployment stood out to me: “Prayer in the Furnace”, about a chaplain stationed in Iraq trying to understand his role in helping Marines process the horrors they’d witnessed (and sometimes brought about); “War Stories”, about a vet hearing his badly disfigured best friend talk about being burned after an IED explosion, and “Money as a Weapons System”, in which a foreign service officer working in reconstruction encounters absurd challenges.
I really liked Redeployment and highly recommend it. I have a few other Iraq fiction books on the TBR list, such as The Yellow Birds and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and am eager to get to them.