Friday Firsts – American War by Omar El Akkad

Friday Firsts is a new meme that will run every Friday here on Tenacious Reader. It will feature the first few sentences/paragraph of my current book and my first impressions as well. It’s meant to be a quick and easy way to share a bit about what I am reading, and I would love to hear others join in sharing their current reads as well.

I was in the mood for something a bit different, and was intrigued by this one.  So far, I’m really enjoying it. I love the concept, it’s set after the second American Civil War which was triggered my some southern states refusing to adhere to new regulations designed to curb global warming. It’s very relevant, and thought provoking, but beyond that, the writing is excellent.

When I was young, I collected postcards. I kept them in a shoebox under my bed in the orphanage. Later, when I moved into my first home in New Anchorage, I stored the shoebox at the bottom of an old oil drum in my crumbling toolshed. Having spent most of my life studying the history of war, I found some sense of balance in collecting snapshots of the world that was, idealized and serene.

Sometimes I thought about getting rid of the oil drum. I worried someone, a colleague from the university perhaps, would see it and think it a kind of petulant political statement, like the occasional secessionist flag or gutted muscle car outside houses in the old Red country— impotent trinkets of rebellion, touchstones of a ruined and ruinous past. I am, after all, a Southerner by birth. And even though I arrived in neutral country at the age of six and never spoke to anyone about my life before then, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that some of my colleagues secretly believed I still had a little bit of rebel Red in my blood.

El Akkad, Omar (2017-04-04). American War (Kindle Locations 117-125). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

My First Impressions

What are you reading right now? Did it start out strong? Feel free to share in the comments!