The Things They Carried
1990 · 256 pages
O'Brien lists what a platoon in Vietnam hauled around, down to the ounce, then tells war stories and takes them back. The invented ones carry the war more exactly than facts could.
★ 7.8
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Lover
1984 · 117 pages
Crossing the Mekong by ferry in 1929, a French girl of fifteen meets the Chinese man who becomes her lover. Duras writes it in fragments that refuse both romance and pity.
★ 6.8
The Quiet American
1955 · 180 pages
Greene put a British correspondent and an idealistic young American in Saigon, fighting over the same woman and over a theory. He saw the American war in Vietnam a decade before it started.
★ 6.7
Dispatches
1977 · 260 pages
Herr covered Vietnam for Esquire at twenty-seven and wrote the siege of Khe Sanh and the ruins of Hue at the pitch of a bad trip. Apocalypse Now took its narration from him.
★ 6.0
Fire in the Lake
1972 · 500 pages
Americans in Vietnam were fighting a country they never tried to understand, FitzGerald argues, explaining Confucian village order and the mandate of heaven to readers whose sons were still being sent there.
★ 5.9
A Bright Shining Lie
1988 · 861 pages
Army adviser John Paul Vann fed reporters the truth about Vietnam while the generals lied, then spent ten years insisting the war could be won. Sheehan reports his private ruin alongside the courage.
★ 5.7
The Sorrow of War
A Novel of North Vietnam
1991 · 240 pages
Kien spends the peace gathering the dead from the jungle that swallowed his battalion, and the war returns out of sequence. Bao Ninh enlisted at seventeen among five hundred, and ten came home.
★ 5.7
A Rumor of War
1977 · 356 pages
Caputo landed at Da Nang in 1965 with the first American ground troops, eager for it. His tour ended with murder charges over two Vietnamese civilians his men shot, and he excuses nothing.
★ 5.6