The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

I have always felt some affinity for the Wright brothers, ever since we went to North Carolina when I was in high school and we visited the Wright brothers' museum in Kitty Hawk. Then Tommy and I went again when we lived in North Carolina, and the Outer Banks became one of my favorite places in the world. I loved visiting there, and I especially remember walking around in the sand dunes in Kitty Hawk when we visited in November, exactly where the brothers made their first flights. With all that in mind, I was excited to listen to this biography about them and their accomplishments. This book mainly covers the years of their innovation and flights, from 1900-1910. In their spare time after working in their bicycle shop, they spent years conducting experiments and studying mathematics and physics to figure out how they could build a flyer that would fly like a bird does. They spent hours observing birds and watching how they made their wings work, and read hundreds of books about how flight might work. It was really amazing to me how they persevered, and how they worked to discover the way to fly. They worked in the evenings and in all their free time for years before they ever even were able to build a plane that would work on its own. It really stuck in my mind how they were serious examples of grit (from Grit) and how they had passion and perseverance to work endlessly towards their goal and make greater and greater strides towards improving it, even when it would take years for them to get anywhere close to their goal. They seemed like true examples of some amazing qualities: humble, hard-working, respectful, stubborn and determined. Their opinions of themselves didn't change when they became famous, and they remained focused on their goals. I really admired them and thought it was pretty amazing how they did it. (It makes me wonder what I could accomplish if I had that much grit and passion about something.) It was also super interesting to learn about their flight demonstrations in America and in Europe and how amazing and awe-inspiring it was to the people then, since nobody had ever seen anything fly before.

Again, McCullough is pretty incredible at conducting detailed research, and it sounds like he read every single letter that they and their family ever wrote to each other. I also really liked how their family was so tight-knit and close with each other, and how they treated each other. The only thing that seemed a little off about their lives was how at the end of the book, he mentioned that they stopped flying altogether to take care of their patent lawsuits they were filing to stop people from stealing their ideas and to protect their legacies. I totally get that, but then on the other hand, it seems like they did kind of change their values from wanting to learn how to fly and to improve to do it better and better, to just wanting to make sure that everyone knew they were the first ones to do it. But, oh well. Good for them, it worked out and they're household names across the world still.

The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie

I obviously have been on an Agatha Christie kick lately, and I requested this one (via Inter-Library Loan, even!) because it's one of the highest-rated Poirot books on Goodreads. I don't want to read all her books, because there are just too many, but I wanted to just read the best ones. This one definitely sufficed. It was kind of a darker murder mystery than many of the other ones I've read, with a lot more suspense, since there were multiple murders and Poirot was responsible for trying to solve the case and find the killer. The murderer is killing people in alphabetical order, starting with a woman whose name starts with A in Andover, and then B, then C, and he sends letters informing Poirot when these things are going to happen. In the end, the police catch a killer, but Poirot figures that the psychology of it does not work, and figures out who it really is. I really liked Poirot's focus on the psychology of the case, using his "little grey cells", in this book. It made a lot of sense why he didn't believe the man had done it and how he figured it out. I really enjoyed this one, and it was a fast and easy read.

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie

I read one or two Miss Marple mysteries by Agatha Christie some years ago--maybe six or seven?--and always meant to read more. And I realized that our library has four or five of them on audiobook, so they will be the next ones I listen to after I finish the one I'm currently on. But this book came first before all the audiobooks the library has, so I wanted to read this one first. This one is about a dead body found in the library of one of Miss Marple's friends, so her friend begs her to help her solve who did it so they aren't suspected of having something to do with the murder for forever. The police are obviously investigating, but Miss Marple manages to figure things out through her understanding of people and her perceptiveness of human nature. This was a very quick read, but a fun one. And now I'm looking forward to some audiobooks of hers!

Belles on Their Toes by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

I'd never read this sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen, mainly because I didn't really realize that this existed. But I saw it while I was reading on Wikipedia about the Gilbreth parents and wanted to finish the story of the Gilbreth family after their father died. This book mostly is about the first few struggling years after their father died, but the last few chapters are also about much later, when the youngest is in high school and graduating from college, and ends with a family reunion after WWII when all the boys are back from the war and the family is all back together. I really enjoyed this one, mainly because I loved seeing all the favorite characters from the first book all back together again, and hearing about how they made it after losing their dad. There were some really funny episodes in this book which made me laugh too. But it doesn't quite hold up to the original (possibly just for the nostalgic reasons which is why I love it so much anyway). It was very reassuring and satisfying to read about how Lillian Gilbreth managed to make her way leading her husband's company and keeping the family together, in an era where most women were looked at as not capable of working in a men's world like that. She developed such concepts as the efficiency kitchen, and the book talked a little bit about how she came up with it--mostly because she figured as a woman, people would be more likely to listen to her if she came to them with ideas to improve the kitchen instead of the workplace. Some of those aspects I would have liked to learn more about (but Wikipedia gave some good information, and I get why the kids didn't really write about it in their book, which was more about the family and the kids).

1776 by David McCullough

When I read The Midwife's Revolt last month for my book club, it got me interested in reading some more things about the Revolutionary War. I realized I really didn't know or remember that much about that time in our history, and what I did know or remember was from listening to the abridged version of David McCullough's John Adams maybe a decade ago. (So, it really wasn't that much. I basically remembered that he lived in Braintree and that he and Abigail loved each other and wrote tons of letters to each other.) I found that this book was available on audiobook from the library and I was super excited to listen to it. This book, as you might imagine, is about all of the battles and difficulties of the Continental Army in the year 1776 (and 1775 leading up to it), mostly focusing on George Washington and his decisions and movements at the time. And all in all, it was really interesting--there were a few times when it was hard to follow some of the specific details about the battles that McCullough went into (and maybe that was just because I was listening and didn't have any visuals that were probably included in the book), but generally, I was pretty impressed by how McCullough made this potentially dry history into such a smooth narrative that was easy to follow.

It was also very impressive how much research into primary sources that McCullough had to do to write this book. Almost every other sentence was a quote from a letter or a diary written by someone at the time--it is exhausting to even imagine how much work it was to track down everything written by everyone, even just random privates in the army, and work it in to the story he was trying to tell. I definitely enjoyed learning more about George Washington--I'd never really thought about what his personality was, other than noble and solemn like he's always portrayed in paintings at the time, and I liked learning more about his flaws and his positive traits. The other thing that really stood out to me was how slowly and deliberately every decision about the army had to be made, on both sides. Information moved so slowly, and people moved so slowly--any battle had to be preceded by days and days of marching, and it kept things from actually progressing very quickly. It was basically understood that people didn't fight battles in the wintertime, so the war would shut down for months at a time. And it was amazing how few people were killed in each battle! Usually, the casualties for the battles described in this book were between 20 and 200--which really is amazing since I normally think about WWII where thousands of people die in every battle. I really enjoyed this and want to revisit John Adams again too (although sadly the library doesn't have an audiobook copy so I'll have to get around to reading that one hard copy sometime).

Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

This is definitely one of my very favorite books of all time. I read it so many times when I was younger, and it's hard to believe that I haven't read it for so many years. This book brings me so much joy, and it made me laugh out loud so many times while reading it. The story of the Gilbreth family and their outrageously outgoing and determined father is such a classic that I can't help wanting to get everyone to read it and enjoy it.

Some things stuck out to me this time around reading it, since this is the first time I read it since having kids of my own and being a grown-up. The main thing I realized is how amazing both of the parents were--how they raised a happy family with so many kids while both working. They did have live-in help (a cook and a handyman--which must have been a huge reason why they managed to do this) and all of this was in the 1910s and 1920s. It was amazing that their mother had a PhD in psychology at that time too--she seriously sounded amazing. Their dad spent all his time trying to teach them things like French and German and Morse code and astronomy, and he genuinely liked being with his kids and figuring out new things for them to do together. I just loved them both.

But another thing that was so fantastic to me this time around was realizing how much Frank Gilbreth sounded like my grandpa Murphy. Seriously--they had so much in common in their pushy and inquisitive and engineering and instructive personalities. Some of the stories just made me laugh out loud imagining Grandpa Murphy doing the same thing. The very fact of Gilbreth's interest in motion study and efficiency is a similarity to Grandpa Murphy's values too. When WWI broke out, Frank Gilbreth just got on a train going to Washington D.C. and sent a telegram to President Wilson saying, "I'm coming on a train this evening. If you don't know how to use me, I'll show you how." Haha! So hilarious and so something Grandpa Murphy would do. It made me miss him and think about him a lot.

Ralph S. Mouse by Beverly Cleary

I don't have much to say about this one that I didn't already say about Mouse and the Motorcycle and Runaway Ralph. I don't know that I ever read this last one in the trilogy, but I don't know that I was missing much. I wish there was a way to introduce Dane to a series and then skip on to a different book while letting him read the other books by himself, instead of having to work our way through all of them. But he really enjoyed this one, which is what matters. There was one scene in the middle where the students in the class Ralph is visiting do presentations on mouse topics, and one boy writes a poem about mice:

Ralph is a mouse.
He's stupid, he's dumb.
He's as bad as a louse.
He belongs in a slum.

And Dane thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He laughed so hard he almost had a heart attack. That made the rest of the book worth it to see how funny he thought that was.

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

I remember watching this movie almost a decade ago, but I didn't remember anything about the plot or characters. So it was fun to revisit this book and read this Agatha Christie classic. She is so fantastic. In this book, all of the characters are on a ship traveling down the Nile, and one of the women is murdered while they all are asleep. In a lot of ways, this book is similar to Murder on the Orient Express, in that there is a closed list of people who are suspects/possibilities for committing the murder, and there are a bunch of almost-clues that Poirot has to piece together. (But the solution is nowhere as complicated as in that book!) I thought the dark and twisted love relationship between Simon and Jackie was a nice storyline, and I liked some of the secondary characters, especially the staid, practical, and good Cornelia Robson. I really got a kick out of lots of Christie's sarcastic asides, especially while describing the characters towards the beginning of the book. I actually laughed out loud at a few of her descriptions and quietly funny lines.

I noticed something about this book, which I think applies to several of the Armand Gamache books I've read--in order to complicate things and not make the mystery too easy to solve, the author throws in two different and unrelated crimes/issues happening at the same time. In this story, it was the murder and the robbery of the pearls--which just coincidentally happened at the same time but by different people totally unrelated to each other. Kind of unbelievable, but that's how these stories do it quite often. Still enjoyable, and definitely a fun read.

Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan

If I'd known this book was yet another WWII book, I probably would have steered clear. I'm so tired of WWII books sometimes. But, every time I read one, it ends up being so excellent. This one did not disappoint. It was set during WWII, but didn't end up being about too much of WWII, because it was from the perspective of three children in different locations around the world. This was a really wonderful middle-grade book that is historical fiction, but just a little bit unreal with a little bit of a fairy tale thrown in. The book starts with a boy named Otto, who is given a magical harmonica when he is lost in the woods in Germany. Later, three other children, Friedrich, Mike, and Ivy, get the same harmonica and it helps them each to move forward and do hard things.

The book is basically divided into thirds, each third telling one of the children's stories with the harmonica. Friedrich lives in Germany right before WWII, and has a birthmark that covers most of his face and makes him a target for bullies, but he soon has bigger problems when his father is taken to Dachau for protesting Hitler's rule. Mike and his brother Frankie live in an orphanage in Pennsylvania, and they are bound and determined to stick together even when it seems unlikely anyone will take them. And Ivy lives with her family in California as farm workers, and when they move to a new town, she has to work hard to try and save their new home. Each story was completely different from the others, and each child was so endearing and easy to love that it was hard to put it down and leave them. Each story ended right at the moment when it seemed like all hope was lost for that kid, but you find out at the very end what happens to them and how all of their stories come together at the end. SPOILER ALERT: Part of me wants to say that the ending seemed a little too convenient (how they all ended up being together at the end) but then again, it isn't that convenient. It really could have worked that way, especially when you're thinking about a huge group of people like an orchestra.

This story was extremely engaging and I loved the characters (although a few of the problems could have been fixed a lot more easily than the book dragged them out to be, like Mike's adoption dilemma was clearly just a communication error). This book was such a great audiobook though. The book was a lot about music--each character was really interested in music, and there were lots of references to songs and mentions of the character playing, and in the audiobook, they would always play the song for you when it was mentioned. I really enjoyed that, and it totally made the experience fuller and richer. I can't imagine that reading it would be the same--this definitely begs to be listened to. I thoroughly enjoyed this and would definitely listen to it again.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

I'd heard a lot about this book, and specifically heard the audiobook version was good. I don't know that I would have bothered to read it if I hadn't had an audiobook copy, because I am trying to work through a lot of other books that are taking more of precedence over random library books for now. But today and the last few days I've been working on a bunch of projects so I couldn't read, but I could listen to an audiobook, so I got a lot of listening in on this and managed to get through it pretty quickly. My main reaction is that I really liked it. It was quick-paced and exciting and engrossing, and a fun read. The story is about Wade Watts, a teenager set in 2045, who is participating in a worldwide contest searching for a hidden Easter egg in the Oasis virtual reality video game. Whoever finds the egg wins the prize of billions of dollars and control over the Oasis.

Here's what I liked about the book: it was fast, fun, and had a super-interesting premise. I thought it was very well-written and it was easy to stay engaged in it, even though I am decidedly not a video game person and the entire book is about video games, past and future. I liked (some of) the 80s references too.

Here's what I didn't like about the book: there were a few things I didn't understand, or quite believe, in the plot. Like, the year is only 2045 and the world is completely unrecognizable from today? I don't believe that. And little things--like Wade goes into debt and has to become the company's indentured servant to pay off his debt? In only 30 years from now? I honestly do not believe that would change that drastically. There were also a few times where I felt like the author contradicted himself about things a few pages or chapters apart (which always bugs me to no end--why did no editor catch that?). It also seemed like a way unnecessarily over-the-top amount of 80s references. It seemed unrealistic that the entire world would be that obsessed with the 80s and not be somewhat annoyed by it, without thinking, "Wow, I don't mind studying all this 80s stuff because it might make us billions of dollars if we win, but I would rather listen to 2045 music once in a while?" There was not a single reference to any sort of contemporary pop culture (other than Oasis video feeds, etc.), which seemed kind of unbelievable as well. There was also some profanity, and more than I thought was necessary.

Anyway, even though my paragraph about the negatives of this book is longer than the positives, I actually thought this book was solid. It's just easier to point out specific things that are irking me than specific things I liked. Here's the main selling point: the book was so good that I kept finding excuses to listen for longer than necessary so that I could get farther along in the story. This is definitely one I'll want to go see the movie. The trailer looks good and I'm excited to check it out.

Runaway Ralph by Beverly Cleary

Dane and I read this one the last few weeks after Dane loved The Mouse and the Motorcycle. I'm pretty sure I never read this sequel, although maybe I did and just have no recollection of it. I feel like this book was definitely not as good as the first one, mainly because Ralph loses his motorcycle five seconds after he runs away and spends the rest of the book locked in a cage trying to get back to his motorcycle. Dane loved it still though--I love how he gets so excited and gasps when something scary happens, like when the cat comes and looks like he's going to get Ralph. I didn't love this one, but Dane did, and he is not going to let me get away without reading the last in the series (although I'm hoping to get to some Little House on the Prairie with him next--crossing fingers he lets me!).

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

I've heard a lot about this book (like everyone on the planet by now), but I only finally got around to reading it because my family chose it for our family book club discussion for this next month. It's actually a good book club book because it is short and fast to read (super fast! I read it in maybe 2-3 hours) but also has some good discussion points since it is kind of an "issue" book. As in, the story has a point to it, which is basically: be kind. It's about Auggie, a kid born with severe facial abnormalities, and his first year at a real school in fifth grade after being homeschooled his whole life. Auggie begins to make friends, and there are obviously some setbacks, but there is a happy ending for everyone.

Some good points I'd want to discuss with everyone (I'm just doing this shorthand because I don't have time for a full well-thought-out blog post right now):
-Isn't the ending a little unrealistic? Doesn't it seem like they're kind of doing the opposite problem of treating Auggie like he's "too" special instead of bullying him? Wouldn't Auggie be annoyed with this sort of treatment too?
-Jack's mean comments about Auggie--how many times have we done the same sort of thing?
-The different points of view--what do we learn about the other characters in the story through having those? (I liked getting Via's point of view, and thinking about how the sibling of a disabled child would be affected.)

Definitely a good book, and it was easy to get into. I am excited to have people to talk to about it when we have our discussion, because I think there are some good things to talk about.

On Loss and Living Onward by Melissa Dalton-Bradford

I read Dalton-Bradford's Global Mom a few years ago and just l-o-v-e-d it, so when I learned that she was writing another book a few years ago, I really wanted to read it too. In Global Mom, she writes about her experiences raising her family in eight different countries all over the world, but the most defining experience (and most devastating) of her book was the death of her eldest son in a freak water accident one week after he started college at BYU-Idaho. She writes very openly and beautifully about her experience grieving and responding to his death in that book, but that was only part of the larger story of her family's life abroad. This book is focused specifically on grief and mourning and is less of a memoir (although many of the essays still feel like that) than it is a collection of thoughts about the experience, feeling, and process of grief, particularly for parents who have lost a child. About half of the book is essays that Dalton-Bradford wrote herself about her family and her son Parker, but the other half of the book is collected quotes that she found in her studies about grief that she conducted as she tried to survive her own. The selections of quotes were very good and insightful and beautiful, although less engaging than the essays, which were beautifully written (like I remember about Global Mom).

I read this book because I liked her other book, not necessarily because I wanted to read a book about grief or mourning. But I think this book would be a very useful tool for when the inevitable moment comes that we will be in grief for someone, or when someone we love is in mourning and we want to help them. She gives some specific advice for what to say and what not to say when someone is grieving, and how you can help them if you want to, but most of the book is about helping understand the perspective of what someone is going through. I think this is definitely a worthwhile read for anyone who wants to be a better friend or family member to someone who is in mourning.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

I feel like half of my audiobook posts start this way: I was looking for a good, quick audiobook to listen to, and this one was available so I checked it out. I really enjoyed listening to Murder on the Orient Express, so I decided to check out a few other Agatha Christies as well. This one is the first in the Hercule Poirot series, so our main introduction to Poirot, and it's pretty good, as far as murder mysteries go. I feel a little like there were too many clues to keep straight here, and I also felt like the narrator, Hastings, was too dense to be believable. Poirot would say things with a pretty obvious explanation and Hastings would never catch the meaning behind what he was saying. I understand the purpose of a Dr. Watson character to whom the detective has to explain what he's thinking, but this was laying it on a little too thick. Also, I hate how Poirot is so stingy with explaining anything throughout the case, only explaining any of his thoughts at the end. Like, he knew for weeks and months what had really happened but he refused to tell anyone because he didn't have proof? Why didn't he tell them so they could help him find it? I hate when it's forced like that. But oh well, that's part of the genre, I suppose, to have a big reveal at the end, so it's hard to get away from it.