War literature

"How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is."

"Our thoughts are clay--they are moulded with the changes of the days--when we are resting, they are good; under fire they are dead. Fields of craters within and without."

  All Quiet on the Western Front was the required summer reading for the class that I'm teaching this year, and I came across these quotes from it today that I thought were particularly moving.

Sometimes I feel that there will never be enough time to read all of the things that I want to read, so I keep an updated list with me wherever I go so I can make sure that nothing important gets left out. There are many books on the list that are classics, some that are a tad obscure, and a few recommendations from friends. But the overwhelming majority of the books on my list fall into the category of war literature. War is a subject that has always fascinated me. My grades were mediocre in history class, yes, but only because I am not interested in the when's and where's. I want a personal, down-in-the-mud, gut-wrenching point of view that ninth grade history books cannot provide. The Things They Carried made me cry. The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell disturbed me. Night gave me nightmares and showed me the best and the worst of humanity in a single page. There is something in the novels, the memoirs, the firsthand accounts, and especially the poetry that digs down deep inside of me and touches something that is all at once frightened and heroic and desperate for the bonds that result from wartime experiences. I have found nothing else in life that touches me in the same way that these stories do. And so I will continue to make my list ever longer and continue to strive for, to grasp at an understanding of the lessons that cannot truly be learnt except by harrowing experience.