The teenage detective viewpoint on Iraq

I was, and remain, a voracious reader, of all kinds of books, on all subjects, written from disparate, sometimes even abhorrent, perspectives. At that time, I was preoccupied with processing what I had seen in Iraq. I read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. I loved YA novels, and was especially taken with a series of epistolary novels told through the text messages of teenaged detectives. I must have read 150 books in my time at Quantico.

—Chelsea Manning, README.txt, (London: The Bodley Head, 2022), 181-182.