if you're looking for something war-time-y to read...

so i was going to post this in with the other one, but i think it deserves it's own. it's a book review, i guess. i'm not normally one for book reviews, but i feel like everyone i know should read this book:

i just finished a fucking fantastic book that it seems like no one else has heard about. it's 'johnny got his gun' by dalton trumbo. it was written in 1939 in response to the first world war, but it's extremely relevant today. it almost seems like no time has passed.

it's about a solider that's lost all of his limbs and whose face has been blown away so that he's essentially trapped inside his own head. it's incredibly powerful. it's not as soul crushing as it sounds like it would be. there's so much beauty in it. a lot of the book is about the beauty of everything we take for granted. the beauty of life. even when we are pained or hurt or bored or tired, we feel and we're alive and we should revel in that. we write off causalities of war as impersonal figures, as statistics, but we should be shaken and bruised by the loss of a single limb, at the lost of a single life, let alone the hundreds, the thousands, the millions of lives. we enter into meaningless wars for empty words like 'democracy' and 'liberty' and 'freedom'. but those words mean jack shit if you're dead.

i was overwhelmed by two quotes from the book. one i think was beautiful, is beautiful, but whose weight is largely based on context. he's realizing that he's lost his legs, after he's already figured out that he's lost his arms and his hearing. his pain is so human. it's so simple and ordinary and scared like the kid that his is. that's what makes it all so heartbreaking. he's no hero, he's just a boy that got shipped off to fight for nothing.

"He started to kick out with his feet to move what was under his legs. He only started because he didn't have any legs to kick with. Somewhere just below his hip joints they had cut both of his legs off.
No legs.
No more running walking crawling if you have no legs. No more working.
No legs you see.
Never again to wiggle your toes. What a hell of a thing what a wonderful beautiful thing to wiggle your toes."

that last line: What a hell of a thing what a wonderful beautiful thing to wiggle your toes.

it crushed me with it's fucking simplicity.

the other one, i think, can stand alone:

Now I lay me down to sleep my bomb-proof cellar's good and deep but if I'm killed before I wake remember god it's for your sake amen.

well, anyway, i hope i've convinced you that you should read it if you haven't. i think vonnegut must've read this book because so much of it is reminiscent of his work, well without the sci-fi aspects or the autobiographical elements or kilgore trout. but if you like vonnegut, especially slaughter house-five, read it. now.