Love and Spin

I wanna start off by saying how much i LOVE this book...it's the reason I'm so behind on my blogs; I simply cannot stop reading. This book is just so beautifully sad-- like, although I think there should be a movie made for it, I don't think anyone could construct a movie to be as good as the book itself. These short little chapters throughout the book are so odd individually, but without them the book would be lopsided (for lack of a better word). I love how Tim O'Brien [the author] plays with the whole notion of reality and fiction; for example, the beginning of Love is being narrated by some unknown person; who I originally thought was Martha. But it's not Martha! It's Tim O'Brien [the character, who is also an author] who tells these fictional stories in serious detail! OK, enough ranting about the marvelousness of the book as a whole, here's what I think about Love and Spin.

Love
Poor Jimmy Cross. I really just want to hug him; he's in love with a girl that doesn't care about him or what he feels about her at all, and he's got all this guilt for Ted Lavender's death. I think in this chapter, I saw how much of a good guy Jimmy is, and how much of a shame it is that he had to be thrown into that war. I don't see how anyone could feel anything but sympathy for him...yet Martha doesn't feel anything.

Spin
My goodness, the diction in this chapter is breathtaking:That is poetry if I've ever read it. It should be made into song lyrics; I literally gasped when I read this part. The way the war and all the aspects of it are described in this chapter just seem so vivid and insane.

"You're pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs--the whole world gets rearranged-- and even though you're pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace." (pgs. 35-36)