Unruly Reader

As we wrap up 2009, this thought crossed my mind:

Does everyone do this, or am I a complete reading freak?

I read about things I never would want to do, and about lives I’d despise leading.

I adore reading about:

espionage (I’m jumpy as all hell)

the sea (I’m a landlubber who’s terrified of deep water and freaked out by the thought of fish bumping up against me)

space (also am freaked out by space—all that vast nothingness out there!)

tragedy (God knows I’ve had it up to here with crappy things happening to the good and decent, doggone it)

journalists (whose work I would find impossible)

U.S. presidents (I cannot imagine why any human would want to hold that largely thankless office).

Yet these books suck me in every time. Why the appeal?!

Do you do this to yourself, too? Or am I truly A Reading Freak?

This week's question, from Booking Through Thursday:

Given the choice, which do you prefer? Real history? Or historical fiction? (Assume, for the purposes of this discussion that they are equally well-written and engaging.)

I'm a nonfiction history reader through and through.

I confess I have an uneasy relationship with historical fiction, which just gets worse, the further back in history the book is set.

Not exactly sure why this is, but it may be that I'm not sure if the history stuff is done correctly in historical fiction, and I am not so ready to suspend disbelief with historical fiction as I am with science fiction, fantasy, time travel, ghost stories, etc.

Also, life was hard back then, and in historical fiction, that really comes through. Those unfortunate souls did not have indoor plumbing! Or furnaces, or proper ovens, or easy access to chocolate, or free public libraries. I often think I would have just withered away from the agonies of it all.

When I'm reading fiction, I'm living in the characters' world. With historical fiction, I don't want to live there. I want to live here, with my hot cup of coffee, thermostat, piles of books, hot running water, Internet, and food I didn't have to strangle with my bare hands. Historical fiction reminds me that I am nothing but one big wimp, and who needs that?

And on that happy note, I'll wish you a very merry Christmas.

This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

Rocketman: Astronaut Pete Conrad’s Incredible Ride to the Moon and Beyond by Nancy Conrad and Howard A. Klausner

This loving posthumous biography by Pete Conrad’s second wife presents him in a very positive light… but so far I’ve not run across anything negative written about the guy, so who knows—maybe her view is fair and balanced?

Other than sensing a general acknowledgment that Conrad was widely recognized as an inveterate wise***, I continue to read only good things about him. And it’s clear that Nancy Conrad adored the man.

I first ran across Pete Conrad in The Right Stuff, which opens with a vignette about him during his test pilot days. At the time, I was not sure he was real—in part because of that book’s subtitle “A Novel,” and in part because he seemed too perfect a character to be real.

So here’s Pete Conrad, in a nutshell: “He was the third man to walk on the Moon. He was the first to dance on it.” (from Rocketman’s epigraph) What’s not to love about that? After Armstrong’s stoicism and Aldrin’s intensity, here we’ve got a lighthearted dude.

Here’s a typical scene, during liftoff of his Gemini mission with Gordo Cooper:
“‘Go, you mother, go!’
Pete let it fly, didn’t give a damn whether he was transmitting or not (he was), didn’t care whether it was cool or not. He flicked all his switches at the proper intervals, giggling like a schoolboy in that metal helmet.” (pp. 139-140)

And in this book we have confirmation that on their Apollo 12 mission, Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean* really did listen (repeatedly) to the song “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies, a song that Dick Gordon apparently adored. (And I thought it was artistic license when they showed such a scene in From the Earth to the Moon.)

This is one fun book to read. Since it's kind of like hanging out with Pete Conrad for a couple hundred pages, how couldn't it be fun?


* Space geeks -- Alert! Alan Bean's artwork is on display at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum! You have until January 13, 2010, to get your bodies over there to check it out.

Babbette over at Babbette's Book Blog is hosting the 2010 Mixology Challenge, and I'm in!