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.