Book 12: One Life by Megan Rapinoe

 Well! I can't exactly say why I didn't read a single book for over four months this year, but that's what happened. I finally started to get a bit back into reading in August, but I'm still trying to re-establish a habit. Fingers crossed. 

I did enjoy this quite a bit - it's a fairly classic ghost-written autobiography about a public figure I know a lot about, but there was a lot of background fleshing out of various public events that I hadn't known about. And I also just appreciated both Rapinoe laying out her philosophy on public service and being an activist and what it required of her, and fun confirmation of various pieces of soccer gossip that I always suspected (she and Abby Wambach were totally dating!) but had never known for sure. There's not much more to it than that, at least not for someone who's been following her career and personal celebrity for a decade at this point, but it was an enjoyable read. It definitely made me appreciate more her experience between the 2016 Olympics and the 2019 World Cup, and how much she risked and how easily it could have all gone very differently. 

Grade: B

Book 36: Foursome by Carolyn Burke

This is a biography that I picked up on a whim when I saw it at the library, and I'm not mad I read it, but I am sort of mad at what it ended up being. It's a book about the relationships between Georgia O'Keeffe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and art collector, and Paul Strand and Rebecca Salsbury, who were colleagues of theirs and also artists. I really enjoyed the time period explored (1900-1930s New York, primarily) and I discovered that there was a lot about O'Keeffe's biography before she went to the Southwest that I didn't particularly know. But it's this odd book that reads much older to me than it is; it was published in 2019, and yet there is so much in the way of "contemporary readers might think this suggests lesbianism or gayness or various other things but we assure you: no" commentary that I barely felt like I knew what I was reading. This is especially true when out of the four the person with the greatest modern fame is by far O'Keeffe, and so there was a certain confusion for me in terms of why this wasn't solely focused on her, or perhaps her and her husband, who played a major role in her career as an artist. I enjoyed learning more about some of the figures and times in this book, but not the actual thrust of this book, on the whole.

Grade: B

Book 27: Me by Elton John

I read this as a companion to the movie Rocketman, which was a really compellingly told biopic of Elton John but which ends in the late eighties when he gets sober and doesn't touch on the most recent twenty years. And it's a perfectly satisfying autobiography written by someone who is willing to closely examine some aspects of his life but not all that interested in getting into others, and the pictures are great (especially when you compare the real life versions of various people to the actors who portrayed them in his movie). I also liked it as someone who had always had a very post-Lion King awareness of Elton John and his career - I knew he had been a major rock star in the '70s, but I didn't fully appreciate what that looked like, and the book was an entertaining overview of that time and who he was. He's also just done so much that there was never really a dull period in his life, for good or bad. I think it was certainly more of an autobiography than a memoir; he's rarely all that interested in digging into his experience beyond the narrative elements of it, but I enjoyed it for what it was.

Grade: B

Book 31: Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris

As is probably clear from the title, this is an autobiography. But it's also a book which cannot really be thought about independently from its specific form, and how it both makes it more fun and more interesting and also, in my experience of it, distances the reader from the subject in a way that's a curious choice for a biography!

Neil Patrick Harris is a former child star who got new life as an actor in his twenties and thirties on both a sitcom and Broadway. He's also openly gay and married to a man with whom he has two children, and the story of how he was outed and then more or less required to be an out public figure feels both quaint in 2018 and also is a good representation of how much has changed and also how much hasn't. This book was published in 2014, and much like Possible Side Effects (although even more startlingly, given how much closer in time it is to the present), the book reads like a tiny time capsule. There are bits and sections of this book that I cannot imagine being edited in the same way if it had been published today, and there's a security in what the future will look like that feels hard to remember experiencing from this vantage point.

The format of the book is to tell the biography in the same way as the Choose Your Own Adventure books did, where the reader gets to the end of a chapter and then decides what they what to happen next in the story. There are two problems with this format for an autobiography. One is practical: there is only one actual narrative to follow, and it's what really happened, and the book isn't constructed in a way to actually get the reader to experience all of the book unless you don't actually follow the paths, which feels poorly constructed! If you're going to make it into a game of sorts, it should actually work.

The second problem is bigger, which is that the story is told in the second person POV, since the conceit is that you are NPH and are choosing what will happen, etc. The problem with this in an autobiography is that it distances the reader from the subject in a way that's difficult to ever bridge successfully. It made me feel like NPH didn't actually have to reveal himself or his experiences in a way that wasn't artificial. I know more about what has happened in his career and life, but I don't actually feel like I know him better, and while that may mean that he feels like he succeeded, it's not what I want from an autobiography. I wanted less gimmick and more introspection, I guess.

Having said all that, it was still worth reading in the end, even if it made me feel like 2014 was forty years ago rather than only four.

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 61: Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

This is a biography of Shakespeare that was written as part of a collection of short biographies of historical figures--it is just under two hundred pages long. It might seem odd that such a short work about the most famous playwright in the world could be satisfying or even remotely complete, but of course what we don't know about Shakespeare's life far outweighs what we actually do.

As a result, this book is as much a history of the time period Shakespeare lived during, the methods various historians have used to discover and verify what we do know about Shakespeare the man (and the methods many frauds used), and the history of theatres in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Bill Bryson is a writer ideally suited to this kind of work; he brings the same wit and clarity and beautiful turn of phrase ("Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context": I don't know if I've ever read a better summation of what we know and don't know about Shakespeare) to Shakespeare that he's brought to travel and science in his other books. This manages to be a book that would be incredibly readable and informative for someone who doesn't know much about Shakespeare while also being immensely satisfying for someone with a deeper knowledge of his background and works.

This was just one of those books that I enjoyed reading so much, from beginning to end, and it's another one of those books that I've owned for so long I don't even remember when or how I acquired it. I'm so glad I finally got around to reading it now as a result of this challenge. Also, it was pretty interesting to read it while in the middle of reading the Lymond Chronicles, since those are set about ten or twenty years before Shakespeare was born. Having a lot of unexpected feelings about the 16th Century right now.

Grade: A