Baghdad Express
I have so many literary weaknesses. Probably too many to list. From the top of that list however, I can tell you the top two. First would be, anything written about Mount Everest and the silly people who spend the month of May playing king of the big hill. It’s intoxicating. A close second would be the war memoir. The later literary obsession started in high school, around the time of the first Gulf War, with The Things They Carried. After that it was a short journey to all things Hemmingway, and then on to Catch-22, Dispatches, etc, etc.

The latest war memoir I’m enjoying is Baghdad Express (site | amazon) by Joel Turnipseed. Turnipseed, like Tim O’Brian (author of The Things They Carried) is from Minnesota. That means two of the better war memoirs to come out in the last 15 years have been by Minnesota authors. Now if only Gabe Hudson was from Minnesota, then we would have ourselves a literary trifecta. More on Turnipseed from Neal Pollack and the Dallas Observer.