Bookish Thoughts

I'll admit, I struggled with this book. It was a surface-level round-up of a very long history spanning decades of aeronautical and space history in Langley, Virginia. It was the author's first book, and it showed in her run-on sentences and difficulty in nailing down a cohesive narrative. It didn't help that I was trying to read the book in 5 and 10 minute chunks, and I was having trouble really getting into it. That said, this is a really important book, and I'm glad I read it. I have yet to see the movie, but it's clear that it condensed the story dramatically, reducing some of it's effectiveness. This isn't the story of a handful of black women who, against all odds, contributed to America's space program. It's the story of generations of black families who were employed buy the Army and NASA. Hundreds of men and women who were able to put their engineering and mathematical talent to use building planes and later spaceships. An entire town that...

It's not lying. It's telling a good story. Following her previous novel about Doc Holliday meeting Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, Mary Doria Russell decided to tackle the gun fight at the OK Corral. Epitaph isn't exactly a sequel to Doc . It has the same characters, sure, and reading the first one will give you a better understanding of Doc Holliday and his relationship with Wyatt Earp, as portrayed by Russell. But this is a separate story entirely. While the story ends up focusing mostly on Wyatt Earp, Russell goes to great lengths to humanize everyone involved in the gun fight. As such, scenes are occasionally rewound to be shown from another perspective. Motives are occasionally given after the fact, but they're always given. Unless, of course, the historic record remained completely silent. Everyone had an opinion about this near-mythical gunfight and the fallout from it. There are countless contradictory accounts, and Russell did her best to sort through them all...

Cold Mountain is another book I skipped by in high school and always vaguely meant to come back to. When I saw it at a used book sale last summer I picked it up without really thinking about it. My friends all read it in AP English our senior year, while I slept my way through Hamlet . It might not have made much mark on my memory at all except that the movie also came out that year. Specifically, the movie was in theaters when I was in Mexico for Spring Break, and I went to see it with my host family. At the time I was mostly eager to be able to sit for two hours without having to think and speak in Spanish. The movie was dubbed, rather than subbed, and would therefore be easy for me to understand. I left the theater with a million thoughts buzzing through my brain, but the only one I was able to express to my host mother was "that was sad", and she didn't seem eager to discuss it beyond that. Over time, those thoughts faded until I was left with nothing more than the...

"Bein' born is craps...How we live is poker " At this point it should probably come as no surprise that Mary Doria Russell has quickly become one of my favorite authors. The only sad thing about Doc  is that now that I've read it, I actually have to wait for Russell's next book to be released. But the happy part is that her next book is a sequel to Doc , so I'll get to spend even more time in the Wild West with these characters. Doc  follows Doc Holliday for the summer he spent in Dodge City when he met the Earp brothers. But like most of Russell's books, it's about a lot more than that. Ostensibly, Doc  is a murder mystery. Except that the kid who died wasn't white, so no one really cares how he died. Then it comes to light that he was robbed of $2000 and suddenly people want to know where that money went. But it's also about Doc's struggle with tuberculosis, his new friendship with Wyatt and Morgan Earo, his contentious...

I've been struggling through The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara for the past few weeks. A colleague at work loaned it to me. The social obligation this creates is probably the only reason I'm still attempting to finish this book. The Killer Angels is about the Battle of Gettysburg. Three hundred and forty five pages of white men shooting rifles at each other. This isn't really my cup of tea. I generally like historical fiction, but military history bores me. If I'm going to read about a battle I prefer there to be some magical element to it. Dragons or giants or showers of sparks flying back and forth. If you take that away and just show men killing each other with ordinary metal, it gets to be a bit too real. It makes me uncomfortable. Knowing that all of this actually happened doesn't help matters. The thing I find most challenging about this book, though, is that it makes all of the characters real and sympathetic. Lee, Longst...