Book 81: The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

I bought this book five or so years ago after seeing the movie based on it, The Eagle, which is a movie that literally makes no sense if the two male leads aren't in love with each other. I had heard from others who had both seen the movie and read the book that the book is differently gay from the movie, but still pretty gay. I am here to report that this is indeed correct.

The Eagle of the Ninth is about Marcus, a Roman soldier in Roman Britain whose father had also been a centurion in Britain. His father went north of Hadrian's wall with his legion (the Ninth) and never returned, losing the standard of his legion (the Eagle) in the process. After Marcus is injured and discharged from duty, he goes to live with his uncle and decides he needs to buy Esca, a British gladiator, to be his body slave. When he finds out that there are rumors of the Eagle being seen north of the wall, he decides he has to go get it himself.

I think the most interesting part of this book is seeing exactly what the movie changed about the story, and what it does to the narrative. The biggest change is that movie!Marcus is significantly dumber than book!Marcus. Book!Marcus is concerned with his family's honor, and he goes on a quest that is fairly foolish, but he has a plan, and before they leave he frees Esca and the two of them are genuinely friends for the entire hunt, which makes the entire journey significantly less dumb. Marcus is also much more a part of Britain in the book; he has friends and connections with people beyond Esca, and he understands British people and also falls in love with a girl who he wants to marry after they return from the north (spoilers!).

On the whole, I enjoyed reading it, although I don't think I would have stuck with it at all if I hadn't already seen the movie. I do wonder what I would have thought of it if I had read it as a child, though, since it's a children's story.

Grade: B

Book 80: Welcome to My World by Johnny Weir

Some autobiographies you read because you don't know much about the subject. Others you read because you're so fond of the subject that you want to read everything about them. For me, this book is squarely in the second category.

Johnny Weir is a figure skater who has had a 'love him or hate him' career. He refused to conform to many of the unspoken standards of his sport, didn't play nice with judges and officials, and had a self-destructive streak a mile wide at times. He was also an incredibly beautiful and accomplished skater who routinely got fucked over in a sport that fundamentally lacks the objectivity of many others.

My sister-in-law gave this book to me for my birthday almost five years ago, and one of the really interesting things about it is how out of date it is as a result. It was written when Johnny had no idea what his post-Olympics life would be like, and so the narrative feels a bit incomplete. That's also because while Johnny did have his triumphs in his career, it wasn't by winning the Olympic medal (or medals) that we're used to judging skaters by. But it's also nice to read his autobiography when it's a bit out of date, because I know how his life has grown and changed in the public eye.

More than anything else, reading this now made me reflect on how much more him he seems now, and how things have changed for him as an openly gay man. Figure skating (and sports in general) still have a long way to go in terms of accepting LGBT athletes, but it's also very easy to see the progress, and to note the shift that has been made in culture.

Grade: B

Book 79: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

One of the challenging aspects of attempting to read a certain number of books per week is that some books are obviously going to take much more time than that. This book is one of them. 

I've read a number of other books by Bryson; his books on travel are delightful and well-known for a reason, and I really enjoyed his short biography on Shakespeare, as well. This book is ambitious on a whole other level. It's a book that manages to be both an overview of a wide number of scientific concepts and also the history of science: how we know what we do (and what we don't know). The focus on how we discovered and expanded upon (and also were proven completely wrong) scientific knowledge gives a context to many scientific principles that I hadn't thought about since I was in high school. His writing is crisp and clear and entertaining, and he is extremely good at telling the story rather than listing dry facts. 

The book was unsurprisingly a combination of a review of things I had once known and a completely new exploration of other topics that I had never learned (or had forgotten completely). Beyond the big names like Newton and Darwin and Einstein, I was fairly unfamiliar with the biographies of many of the scientists who were so influential. One aspect about those biographies that I loved was the revelation of how much we know as a result of longstanding feuds between individuals who were driven by little more than spite. On the other hand, I found myself newly enraged at the constant dismissal of women scientists by their peers and the institutions and organizations of their disciplines for centuries. Bryson certainly doesn't skip over this reality, but it made me want to read a book just like this one that only focused on the contributions of women to scientific discovery that have been neglected and ignored and deliberately hidden for far too long. 

I bought this book almost ten years ago while I was in Germany, but somehow never got around to reading it until now. I'm glad I finally did. 

Grade: A

Book 78: The History Boys by Alan Bennett

I saw this play almost exactly ten years ago on the closing night of its Broadway run. I bought the play soon after, and I also own the movie version (with the same cast), although I've never watched it. It's a play that has stayed with me for a decade, and I was really curious (and a little apprehensive) about what it would be like to read it after so long.

It's amazing how indelible certain performances can be. I can still hear Samuel Barnett saying almost all of Posner's lines, but the rhythm of the words on the page is so crystal clear for all of the characters that most of the time I'm not hearing specific actors' choices, I'm hearing the talent of a playwright who can capture a character in two or three words. The play is about education, and class, and when narrative and surprise is more important (or at least attention-getting) than the truth, and while all of those issues were important and vital twelve years ago when it was written, it feels frighteningly relevant for right now. And yet it's not a play that's about the virtue of truth verses the sham of fiction; none of the characters are without flaws, and some of the most sympathetic characters are in fact the most morally suspect. The only real exception is Mrs Lintott, who is the only woman in the play and also has the least power and influence. This isn't a coincidence.

It's a play and a story that makes me feel a bit like my heart has been scooped out of my chest. It's about being known, and seeing your reflection in the writing of someone else, someone whose words have made it to you across time and without specific direction, but which have hit a bull's eye nonetheless. I think in some ways reading it at the age of 36 hit me even harder than seeing it at 26 did.

The other great thing about reading it is the foreward; Bennett discusses how and why he wrote it, and what was behind it, and while sometimes that can be dangerous, in this case it just deepened my appreciation for it, and for the collaboration and creative process of theater. It made me miss being a part of that very very much.

I also find it fascinating that The History Boys was on Broadway the same year Spring Awakening debuted on off-Broadway and then transferred to Broadway shortly thereafter. They were developed and created completely separately, but there are so many common themes between them, beyond the setting of a classroom. They both make my heart ache.

Grade: A

Book 77: Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce

Man, what a great book. This book basically has so much of what I love: a girl who wants to become a knight and so dresses up as a boy in order to become one, plus secrets and friendships and danger and noble self-sacrifice and magic. Also there are twins who switch places because they know better than their father does and I am always here for that sort of Parent Trap nonsense, even though the end result will clearly be very very different. 

This is another YA novel that I really wonder how I would have responded to it if I had read it when I was actually a young adult. Because it's great and incredibly satisfying as an adult, but I'm sure it would have blown my mind if I had read it at 11 or 12. Regardless, I'm super glad I've read it now, and I am definitely looking forward to finishing the series once I complete this challenge.

Grade: A

Book 76: Batman Under the Cowl by Grant Morrison et al.

About six years ago, I started to think that maybe I should get into comics. I watched Batman: The Animated Series when I was a kid, and I liked it fine, but the comics had always been something that my brothers were into and I wasn't. But comics were always something that other creators of things I liked tended to like, and so I thought I would give them a shot. So I bought this because I knew of one of the writers of one of the comics in it, without realizing that it was a comics sampler, more or less.

This means that while there are six issues in this trade, they're all from different runs and involve different Batmans and villains and Robins and all that. Each of them is fine on its own, and I have enough knowledge of the Batman backstories to follow them, but so far what I have found with comics is that every time I attempt to read them, I encounter tropes I love (noble self-sacrifice, secrets, amnesia), but they're rarely the narratives I want about them. It's like the fun house mirror version of all of my favorite things. So like. This trade is fine for what it is, but thus far there's no there there for me in comics. But if I decide to try out comics again in the future, I'm definitely asking my comics-loving friends for specific recommendations on which runs to read, because I know that makes a huge difference, too. I think it's okay to also acknowledge that it just might not be my thing, though.

Grade: B 

Book 75: McLevy: The Edinburgh Detective by James McLevy

This book is essentially a memoir of detective stories, written by an Edinburgh policeman a few years before Arthur Conan Doyle began his medical studies in Edinburgh in the mid-19th century. He was one of the first writers of the true crime genre, and all of his stories are of his own experiences catching thieves at their own game.

I can't claim to be a huge crime writer, and all of these stories are more like vignettes than full proper stories, without a lot of suspense about whodunnit or any of that. The writing is thick and quite a bit denser than modern prose, but it definitely paints a picture of Edinburgh back in the day, and the narrator's pov is clear and distinct. Like a lot of short story collections, some of the stories are stronger than others, but the best of this bunch are really compelling and capture the era for the modern reader. I've been reading a lot of historical fiction written well after the fact, so it was nice to get to read something historical that was written during the time.

Grade: B 

Book 74: The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

My grandparents gave me this book when I was ten, and somehow I never read it. I have no idea why I didn't; it's exactly the sort of book I ate up as a child, historical fiction about a girl all alone in the world having to find her way. It's especially perplexing to me since I'm sure part of why they gave me the book is that it's set in a town very close to where they lived, and I loved visiting their house. What gives, ten year old me? It's a mystery.

The good news is that I got to read it now, and I really enjoyed it. It takes place in the mid-17th century and focuses on a 16-year-old girl named Kit, who was raised on Barbados by her grandfather after both of her parents died when she was young. After his death, she leaves Barbados for Connecticut, where her mother's sister and her family live. She discovers that the life of puritans in the colonies is very different than what she had experienced on the island, and is met with suspicion from the outset. This suspicion isn't helped when she befriends Hannah Tupper, the Quaker woman who lives on Blackbird Pond and is shunned by the town.

Even though it's a children's book and therefore I assumed it had to end happily, I actually found a lot of this book quite stressful. Part of that is because I dislike The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter so much, and so any story involving the same issues is going to make me unhappy on some level, even if things end well. Once I got to the end of the story I was then able to reflect on what I really liked about it, and enjoy what it was. I don't know; I think that I would have been better off reading this when I had been younger, because my experience with narratives wouldn't have colored how I read this book. And that's not the book's fault, that's all on me.

Grade: A

Book 73: Creating Flow with Omnifocus by Kourosh Dini

Omnifocus is a task management program that is based on the Getting Things Done system by David Allen. A good friend of mine swears by Omnifocus, and I had read GTD a while ago, and it seemed like it made a lot of sense but would be better for me as a digital program rather than a paper-based one. I bought the Omnifocus program and iPhone app a while ago, but it's the sort of system that is really only useful if you fully commit to putting your entire life into it. I bought this book with the intention of seeing if I was ready for that sort of commitment, and it sat unread on my phone for three or four years until now.

The book does a fairly good job of highlighting both the benefits and the drawbacks of the system. The main innovation of both GTD and Omnifocus is the idea that in addition to breaking down projects into specific individual tasks or actions, each task should be categorized and organized by a context, or what kind of task it is (and what it requires to be done). So you sort all of your phone calls, or everything that needs to be done in a specific place, or all emails, and that way you're making progress on small pieces of multiple projects, without having to switch gears task by task. Basically, it's intended to make easier to accomplish things, by minimizing distractions in moving from one task to the next.

This makes a ton of sense to me instinctively, and I love the idea of having everything written down and organized in one complete system. But I had stopped using the app and had hoped that the book would provide the sort of lightbulb moment that would make me trust it would be worth the initial effort of inputting everything in my life, essentially.

It didn't quite do that; most of the advice and insight on how to use it either seemed totally self-explanatory or was so advanced and complicated that I couldn't for a second imagine myself doing that. I came away still feeling like Omnifocus is probably a great system, but may not be worth it for me. I love lists, but maybe I don't actually need one centralized macro list of my lists. I tend to have a good grasp on what I need to be doing; my issue tends to be less that I forget what I have on my plate and more that I don't always do those things because something else seems more interesting.

Having said that, in the four days since I finished this book, I have been thinking a lot more about the system, and when I think of things I need to do (or want to do), my brain immediately slots them into place within the Omnifocus system. So maybe I'll give it another try after all. If nothing else, this book reminded me of exactly why I found Omnifocus intriguing when I first heard about it, so it did its job.

Grade: B