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