An Accomplishment

I have at last, for the first time ever, completed my coloring in page and obtained the library's 100-hour reader t-shirt for the summer reading program. While keeping track of time, or even the tracker, has been a barrier, I have to admit that even for me 100 hours in three months is quite a lot of reading. (DOB opines that reading for work should count but I never do count it, it's too fragmentary.) I don't listen to books in the car or while doing chores usually--I need a lot of auditory silence to function the rest of the time--so it essentially means I must eschew nearly all other leisure activities in favor of reading. It was fun to do but I'm also quite relieved to be done. I don't really need a lot of extra challenge in my life. 

My latest childhood re-read was Huckleberry Finn, which I picked up when James by Percival Everett came in at the library. It was a compelling pairing. The tone is understandably vastly different--Huck is a boy having the adventure of a lifetime, James is an adult in constant mortal peril. I didn't try to do a point-by-point comparison of the plot or timeline--most of major characters and events carry over and James has his own encounters during the portions where they are separated. The ending is completely different, but Tom's "rescue" is so absurd I don't see any way it could have fit in the more serious book. On the whole it gave a compelling perspective of what it is to live a life of oppression in a world superficially pleasant. There were a few places where James felt more like an idealized 21st century character than a genuine person in the past. For instance, while I can accept James as a skeptic, especially after sneaking Enlightenment authors out of Judge Thatcher's library, he comes across as a 21st century skeptic for whom the lack of the spiritual is a simple given not as a 19th century one always looking over his shoulder. More than that, the portrayal that all the enslaved people were feigning any religious fervor solely to pacify the white folks seemed disrespectful to the history and contribution of the African-American church. 

The Frugal Wizard's Guide to Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson was just plain fun. 

Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope. I needed one more long public domain audiobook to get me through and this was just the ticket. Except there are some events that did not happen in this one so clearly I'm going to need to finish the Barchester Chronicles. Trollope is particular vicious in his satire of the Victorian gentry posing over birth and money in this one. Also I had to laugh at the lawyer who complained of needing to work until 9 every night and then wasting hours of time just chit-chatting. I've seen those billable records. I'm still working on getting myself to stop at 5, though. 

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline. OK, I really have been spoiled by my recent ancient history readings. This one was, despite the inspiring title, quite dull and academic and full of hedged answers and cited quotations from specialists in Mycenean pottery, which caused me to lose interest and start speculating on how one becomes a specialist in Mycenean pottery and what their lives looked like. I guess it was interesting enough for me to finish, though. 

I almost forgot because I finished it awhile ago but wanted to wait to add it to my list until after book club discussion: A Warrior of the People by Joe Starita. I read this first about a year ago and thought my book club would enjoy it, which they did. Susan LaFlesche (the first Native American to become a doctor with Western medicine) was an amazing person and the way she and her siblings threaded the balance as advocates for their people and simultaneously helping their people adapt to the changing world was thought-provoking. It definitely held up to a re-read. 

And now Duchess is getting married in two weeks so who knows what reading will occur, although I'm not really trying to contribute anything more than showing up and making sure siblings are decently attired.  

Robin Hood and his merry . . . everything

Robin Hood has always been a favorite of mine because it is, for Anglo-derivative cultures, the fairy tale of which the Magna Carta is the founding document--the ideal of the rule of law, of the king and the sheriff being subjects of the law, not the origin of it. And, of course, it's just a lot of fun. Though I have to admit, it's a bit repetitive, something even the small ducklings twigged onto back when they would listen to the Howard Pyle audiobook every night. First Robin Hood meets a stranger--they get in a fight--Robin Hood loses--everybody laughs and they join Robin Hood's band. Though even that formula has a subtle truth about leadership. 

But what struck me more this time was the sheer joy at the root of protest. Robbing the rich to give to the poor is of course not quite on point; Robin Hood is part an Anglo-Saxon partisan sticking it back to the Normans and part his own arbiter of a rough justice. But though Robin Hood is happy to help out the poor when the occasion comes, it sounds to me like of the money lifted from the overfed abbots most of it goes to keep the merry men in ale and Lincoln green. Nonetheless, he certainly does have a revolutionary edge but I think the strength of it is that it comes from joy more than anger. If there is one adjective that gets painfully overused in the stories, it's merry. But that is also the key. Vengeance nearly always turns sour; the men get replaced with pigs but the same oppression goes on. But joy . . . joy can be shared. Joy can let us remember what we are fighting for. Even the Sheriff of Nottingham can join the fun if he only submits to lightening his purse and laughing at himself. 

Anyway, children have been reenacting Robin Hood and Little John for almost a thousand years and I hope they continue for a thousand years more. 

Moby Dick I finished it and it was well worth re-visiting; it won't be the last time. The more I read it the more the long digressions on natural history felt like the book itself was deliberately taking us on the similitude of a whaling voyage; long periods of boredom interspersed with heart-stopping action. And the compelling triad of the cheerful skepticism of Stubbs, the steadfast piety of Starbuck, both ultimately doomed by Ahab's obsession.  

And the Ocean was Our Sky by Patrick Ness. It seemed like a good time to do a Moby Dick riff; in this one, it's the whales who are the heroes. It was fun to read but I didn't feel the whale world quite held together and the book and its moral seemed at odds with each other. 

Life Between the Tides by Adam Nicholson. This one was a spontaneous grab from a library display and I was blown away by it. It's about a man building his own tide pool on the Scottish coast but it's also about philosophy, ecosystems, natural history, and nearly everything else, beautifully written. 

On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz. This was recommended on a local book list and was fun read; the author walks around her own block, then takes a similar walk with a variety of experts, from a geologist to a sound engineer, to learn to notice more. My favorite of all was the walk with her toddler son, though. That was still one of my favorite things ever that the kids and I did when they were tiny; we could walk the same route every day for a year and there was always something to notice, something to talk about. Although my block is very different from Horowitz's and many of her experts would not have much to work with (there's almost no lettering and hardly any rocks except gravel) the idea of there always being more to see applies to everything.

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson. I have been meaning to read this for a long time but finally remembered to actually do it. It was utterly delightful; there are deadly spores and a brave and resourceful heroine and an adorable talking rat in a pirate hat and everything wrapped up just as it should, but in quite surprising ways. However, I am not satisfied with the water cycle explanation, even if it means I have no personality. 

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells. This was easy to get on audio once Moby Dick was over, inspired by some passing reading of a post complaining of the "mad scientist" trope because such individuals (as first typified by Dr. Moreau and Dr. Frankenstein) were clearly not mentally ill. This seemed not only to miss the rather obvious point that words have many shades of meaning, but that "mad" in particular is not about cause but effect: behavior that outrageously passes the bounds of human expectation--whether motivated by anger, mental illness, whimsy, or scientific hubris.