Rhea's 2013 ROOT Challenge

I want to start small and read 40 books I own that are under 300 pages this year. So here's my list. My problem isn't that I buy too many new books, but that I read ebooks instead of physical books.

Ratings: +=Excellent, nothing=Fine, -=Terrible

Read this year- (40/40)
+The Conspiracy by John Hersey, +Demain by Herman Hesse, +Farewell Waltz by Milan Kundera , +The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, +A Separate Peace by John Knowles, +Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, The Satyricon by Petronius / +The Apocolocyntosis by Seneca, +Star-Begotten by H.G. Wells, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman, The Song of Roland by Anonymous, +Great Short Stories by American Women edited by Candace Ward, +The Moon-Spinners by Mary Stewart, Our Town/The Skin of Our Teeth/The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder, Henry V by William Shakespeare, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, +Momo by Michael Ende, +Passing by Nella Larsen, A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, +Lysistrata by Aristophanes, The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Basho, Go Ask Alice by Anonymous, The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, The Beggar's Opera by John Gay, and +Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, +The Golden Days by Cao Xueqin, +The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, +The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, Dubliners by James Joyce, Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw, The Ladies of Missalonghi Colleen McCollough, The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare, +The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov, That Summer by Sarah Dessen, A Man without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories by Scott F. Fitzgerald, Richard III by William Shakespeare

To read-
None!

Abandoned-
-The Godfather (Terrible book), David Copperfield (Not worth the luggage space), The Tenants of Moonbloom, The Ox-Bow Incident (forgot I gave it to my grandfather)

To illustrate my problem, here's a terrible cellphone picture of my bookcase. The tiny stack on the top right (on top of the bookcase) are the only ones I've read.

Hmmm, this might take more than one year of ROOTing.

Welcome to the group Anoplophora!

Your bookshelf looks like a typical LT member's then? :) Welcome and I hope you love this place.

Thank you guys for the welcome! I haven't amassed more books than I can read before I die yet, so I have hope.

Welcome aboard! Very nice bookcase -- both the bookcase itself and its contents :)

Anoplophora, welcome!

What is your goal for 2013? I see you've read 5 already but there are 35 on your list, is 40 your goal?

I'll probably never make it, but that's a good goal. I'll edit my first post so that's clearer.

Welcome Anoplophora!
Good luck with your challenge and happy readings!

Welcome Anoplophora.

You call yourself Rhea. That's easy to remember. My goddaughter is called Rhea!

Thank you both for the welcome!

I finally finished Nausea, which took me so long because I won't read anything in public with a half-naked person on the cover. I'm almost done with The Satryicon too.

Nausea was interesting, in that Roquentin comes off as human. I'm convinced authors don't base their characters off of people, they base them off other fictional characters. So it's nice to find a book that makes me doubt that. I'm not really enjoying The Satyricon though. Instead of putting the numerous footnotes at the bottom of the page Penguin puts them at the end so I have to keep flipping back and forth. The text is also fragmented enough that it's hard to follow.

The Satyricon didn't get any better but I liked The Apocolocyntosis. Now onto Star-Begotten, which is one of the works I'm least looking forward to. It's low rating and small readership despite being by H.G. Wells isn't encouraging.

Star-Begotten was excellent, and I just finished Solaris. Solaris was weird, not because of the sci-fi aspect, but because I could not find any motivations behind the character's actions. They just seemed to illogically jump from one plan to the next and I felt very disconnected. Perhaps I've been reading too much where everything is spelled out for the reader. On to The Ruby in the Smoke.

Finished The Ruby in the Smoke. It was your average kid's book, nice and cute, with some loose ends left hanging so you buy the next in the series. I started this when I was younger (middle school?) and found it too boring to finish. I wanted magic like in His Dark Materials and there was no magic.

On to The Song of Roland, which has a 50 page introduction followed by 100 pages of poem. It's always difficult to decided whether to read introductions or not. They spoil the plot and you go in with preconceived notions. I've decided to read it this time though, since I have no hope of understanding an 11th? century poem without some background info.

The Song of Roland's introduction was a strange one. The translator seemed to be responding to several criticisms of the poem, giving reasons why those criticisms are missing the point.

#1. We shouldn't judge the poem by the character's bizarre actions, because they happened in the past and so for the poem's original audience were immutable. Wondering why such and such character did something or judging them for their actions is missing the point. Especially if that person is the main character and thus inerrant. Then something about free will, Boethius, and Custer's last stand.
#2. We shouldn't judge the poem on its historical inaccuracies because art.
#3. We shouldn't judge the poem on its repetitiveness, sparse language, and lack of description because it uses the techniques of oral poetry.
#4. We shouldn't judge the poem on its bigotry because... I'm not sure there can be an argument for that.

Gah. I was turned against the poem before I even started reading it, especially once I discovered why the translator spent so much time saying I shouldn't judge Roland. I judge Roland.

Great Short by American Women was awesome. It had a couple short stories I read back in high school English and didn't fully appreciate. Not a bad one in the entire book.

I finished The Moon-Spinners, and the two plays in the Thorton Wilder volume I hadn't read. The Moon-Spinners was the one on my list I was least looking forward to, since I had such an awful time with the other thriller by Stewart I'd read, but it turned out to great. I liked The Matchmaker better than The Skin of our Teeth.

The Matchmaker has an interesting history. To summarize the Wikipedia page, the original play was by John Oxenford in 1835. It was later extended by Johann Nestroy, then set in America by Thornton Wilder in 1938 and titled "The Merchant of Yonkers". The Merchant of Yonkers went on Broadway and was directed by Max Reinhardt, who even I have heard of. The play was then reworked by Wilder in 1953 and retitled "The Matchmaker." It was fairly popular, people got awards, and it was given a film version. Then, in 1964, it was reworked yet again by David Merrick as the musical "Hello, Dolly!". The plot was also borrowed by Tom Stoppard for On the Razzle.

I've been reading these in a strict order, but that's going to stop because I moved and can't find anything. I'll try not to avoid anything and thus end up with a string of uninteresting books at the end, but books I don't have to search for now have top priority.

I read the Signet Classics version of Henry V, and even though the play itself was short reading, the commentaries and source material were hard to get through. My favorite part was Canterbury's bee speech. The amount of French dialogue was surprising, it makes me wonder how much French the average Elizabethan spoke. The House on Mango Street was perfectly fine, but I wasn't feeling it.

I started Momo last night, which is very good so far.

I only read a little snippet of the Song of Roland). I judged Roland, too.

>18 Caramellunacy:
It's hard not to judge Roland. His actions are pretty inexplicable.

Momo was lovely, and I really liked it, but it had enough problems that I would never give it to a small child. (Spoilers) The grey men of the Timesaving Bank steal people's time and use it for themselves. This inflicts the problems of Modern Society on Momo's city, making it a thinly veiled allegory of the evils of consumerism and such. Momo must defeat the Timesaving Bank and destroy the grey men to save her city and her friends. The problem is that the grey men need to steal time to survive, and when Momo cuts off their supply they all die. None of the characters show any remorse about this. I dislike this kind of narrative immensely, and since several of the grey men were given dialogue and human characterization I was expecting a better resolution than that. But... it really was a lovely book. I really enjoyed it.

Passing is incredible so far. Nella Larsen really manages to breath life into her characters, and their emotions are expressed so perfectly.

I finished A Moveable Feast, which was hilarious in that dry kind of hilarity. Hemingway meets up with Gertrude Stein, makes fun of Sherwood Anderson, and goes on a road trip with F. Scott Fitzgerald. I didn't realize that The Torrents of Spring was a parody of Dark Laughter. According to the Wikipedia page, it's not really nonfiction, but it was amusing.

I just finished a ROOT not on my list, The Golden Days, volume 1 of The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. This book was phenomenal. It sort of drifts from character to character, much like a dream. Characters you meet on page 10 will drift away, only to be returned to on page 450. The characters are easy to remember because they are all so different and human.

The authors keep the Chinese pronunciation of major characters (Bao-yu instead of Precious Jade), but they translate more minor characters' names into the literal meaning (Tealeaf instead of Ming-yan).

From the introduction and skimming the Wikipedia page, Red Chamber is one of the Four Great Classical Novels. The other ones are Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West. Sometimes people throw in Jin Ping Mei for Five Great Classical Novels. These are all must reads for me, but I keep avoiding them because many of the current translations aren't highly regarded. There are entire chapters The Golden Days organized around poetry, and although it was pretty good English poetry, it always makes me so sad to read translated poetry. The Chinese version must be so much more.

Well I finally hit my first real dud, The Godfather. I'm around 350 pages into it, and I'm not sure I want to finish. The first book was fantastic and I loved it, but after then Puzo seems to lose focus and the rest is boring. The way he treats his female characters is also really starting to grate on me. There is an entire point-of-view character whose primary characteristic is her large vagina.

I read Lysistrata aloud with some of my friends (great people) a couple of weeks ago, just realized it was on my list. Hilarious play, we all laughed so loud we were in tears and my current roommates thought we were crazy. I don't get to see those friends very often and it's sad, because people who will agree to read old plays aloud are rare. People who will read them and like it are rarer. This was our first one by Aristophanes.

Half way done and several of the ones I was least looking forward to are off the list. My most anticipated now is Bend Sinister, while my least anticipated is The Consolation of Philosophy. I'm currently away from home, but I brought a couple really long ROOTs with me. I'm halfway through both David Copperfield (not enjoying it) and The Decameron (enjoying it immensely).

I always thought David Copperfield the most boring of his novels. The hero is such an uninteresting, uninspiring lad. What is it you don't like?

It's harsh of me to say, but I'm not finding the literary merit. David comes of as Sueish, the other characters come off as wooden, the plot is boring and lacks suspense, it doesn't say anything interesting to me, and the writing even seems sloppy since it's all in David's annoying voice. Wherever you look in A Tale of Two Cities (the only other Dickens novel I've read) you get absolutely beautiful description. David Copperfield lacks that.

Yes, that's what I thought about it, too. Funnily enough, A Tale of Two Cities is one of the two Dickens novels I haven't read, looks as if I ought to give it a try. Most of all I don't like his heroines, they're always so meek and suffering and liking it, too. The only one I can think of who is different is Bella in Our Mutual Friend.

>23 Settings:: That sounds like a great way to read plays! :)

>26 MissWatson:
Excellent! I love it when people dislike the same things I do. I hate it when authors do that to heroines too. There are meek female characters in A Tale of Two Cities, but there is also at least one strong one. Several of the heroines in David Copperfield are David's anchors, but I wouldn't call them especially strong.

In The Decameron, both the male and female characters come off as equally human, and there are dozens of strong female heroines. I actually think David Copperfield comes off poorly against it in this regard. Yet The Decameron is blatantly sexist. Full of gems like this, "it is more unseemly for a woman to make long speechs than it is for a man," etc.

>27 rabbitprincess:
It's a lot of fun, you should try it. I really recommend Lysistrata, or anything by Euripedes. I don't know if you read them, but really old plays can be really funny because the logic and morality behind them doesn't make sense anymore. It's easiest for each person to have their own copy of the play to read along, then assign parts as you read so everyone speaks equally.

I have finished The Decameron! Good to get such a long ROOT off my shelf.

I'm going home tomorrow and I'm leaving David Copperfield behind. I'll count it as abandoned for now, unless I decide to finish it up as an ebook.

Wow, what a great job, Rhea!

Indeed, amazing. What did you think of The Decameron?

Welcome! Keep up the good work!

>31 MissWatson:, >32 cyderry:

Thank you two! You keep up the good work too! For a book that's so old, The Decameron surprisingly read like a guilty pleasure, and I really liked it. Boccaccio was an awesome person.

I haven't read any ROOTs since I've got back, and I acquired a bunch of mythology books from my grandfather. All four Masks of God, Gawain and the Green Knight, The Golden Bough, The White Goddess, Reading Egyptian Art, Parzival, American Indian Myths and Legends, and many more. My grandfather's collection of books is just fabulous, they're all books on mythology, philosophy, and science. And he's read all of them too. He's giving them to me because he can't read them anymore because of his eyesight. I feel so guilty taking them, but at least he can still read on his Kindle.

Sounds like an amazing collection. Enjoy!

Can't figure how far along you are. Any chance of getting a ticker on the ticker thread?

>35 cyderry:
Okay I'll do that.

I finished The Chocolate War, which was alright. I'm not giving it five stars though. (21/40)

I'm stalled on The Tenants of Moonbloom and Man and Superman. The introduction to Man and Superman was interesting, but I don't like the play. I don't think Shaw understands people at all.

Well, I am doing terrible at this, nothing since mid-September and the end of the year is coming up soon. Too many reading challenges at once, too much going on with my life. :(

I should probably put Man and Superman and The Tenants of Moonbloom away, part of my problem is that I just don't want to read either of them. Nothing really wrong with The Tenants of Moonbloom, it's just not as interesting as the other things I have to read. I really dislike Man and Superman though.

Just put them away, Rhea.

Surely there's something in your pile that fits your mood better!

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Basho.

This is a combination of poems and narrative. It had a lot of poems about insects, comparatively.

"Hardly a hint
Of their early death,
Cicadas singing,
In the trees."

"Crawl out bravely
And show me your face,
The solitary voice of a toad
Beneath the silkworm nursery."

Go Ask Alice by Anonymous.

This is a diary of a teenager that details her spiral into drug abuse. It doesn't read like an actual teenager's diary (I wrote one), nor do the events in it really make sense. I wasn't surprised to find out it was fake, but I didn't guess. I just assumed it was highly edited.

I'm currently reading The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, but I've technically read it before, if skimming it to pass the test counts, so I will complain about it now.

It is what it is, but reading this kind of stuff is painful for me. From my (very limited) experience, classical/medieval philosophy consists of false dichotomies, strawmen, and circular reasoning. Yet these works are the foundation of Western thought, so perhaps I'm just missing a lot.

The book is a conversation between two speakers, Boethius and Philosophy. Philosophy gives her arguments, and Boethius agrees with everything she says. This gets annoying very quickly.

Here is an excerpt.

Philosophy: “... Now, no one can deny that something exists which is a kind of fountain of all goodness; for everything which is found to be imperfect shows its imperfection by the lack of some perfection. It follows that if something is found to be imperfect in its kind, there must necessarily be something of that same kind which is perfect. For without a standard of perfection we cannot judge anything to be perfect.”
…
Boethius: “That is firmly and truly established."
...
Boethius: “I agree.” “Your argument cannot be contradicted.”
…
Boethius: “I agree.”
…
Boethius: “Yes.
…
Boethius: “I found your earlier arguments unassailable, and I see that this conclusion follows from them.”
…
Boethius: “I can think of nothing truer, or more reasonable, or worthier of God.”
….
Boethius: “This is a beautiful and precious idea.”

...
Boethius: "There is no doubt about that"
...
Boethius: "I cannot see how anyone would disagree."
...
Boethius: "That is so."
...
Boethius: "I must agree, since your entire argument is established by sound reasons."
...
Boethius: "They are indeed."
...
Boethius: "You have proved this beyond all doubt."
...
Boethius: "This seems to be true."
...
Boethius: "I cannot deny that."
...
Boethius: "On further consideration, I see that this is so."
...
Boethius: "I now see clearly"
...
Boethius: "That is true."
...
Boethius: "True."
...
Boethius: "That is perfectly correct."
...

Poem 12 in Book 3 was actually very beautiful. It just made this entire book worth reading.

Okay, I am going to give one last shot at finishing this.

My extra Roots now count as part of the 40 I wanted to read, so I have read 29.5/40.

I've tracked down these books, and I am going to finish Man and Superman if it kills me. That will bring me to 38 books.
That Summer by Sarah Dessen, The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare, Richard III by William Shakespeare, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories by Scott F. Fitzgerald, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee, Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov, Dubliners by James Joyce.

I need 2 more, which will be A Man Without a Country and The Ladies of Missalonghi.

The order will be this.

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
Dubliners by James Joyce
Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw
The Ladies of Missalonghi Colleen McCollough
The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov
A Man of the Country by Kurt Vonnegut
That Summer by Sarah Dessen
Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
Babylon Revisited and Other Stories by Scott F. Fitzgerald
Richard III by William Shakespeare

These are really short books. I am home for Christmas, I have no work to do, if I read diligently I can finish 3 or 2 of these a day. This is doable. My problem is going to be reading other books. So I will not read Three Kingdoms, I will not read manga, I will not read Lover Avenged, I will not read The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, I will not read Feet of Clay, I will not read any of the other books that will suddenly become interesting as soon as I commit to this.

Just keep up the good work, Rhea!

I finished The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, which was alright. Unfortunately there were no locusts, which disappointed my entomologist soul. Bait and switch.

I also finished Dubliners and Man and Superman. I didn't get much out of Dubliners, and Man and Superman was one of those books where it took a lot of effort to keep my eyes on the pages.

I started The Ladies of Missalonghi, and I'm enjoying it so far, much more than the last three. There are allegations that this book plagiarized The Blue Castle, but honestly, if it's just the plot (which doesn't seem that inspired, anyway) and not the actual words I don't care that much. Horrible of me.

8 more books left to read.

I finished The Ladies of Missalonghi, which I liked. It was nice and adorable without being too saccharine. The heroine gives everyone who deserves it a satisfying tongue-lashing, gets her man, and it had nicely written descriptions of Australian scenery.

7 left to read.

Gogogogogogo!!

Connie, thanks for the encouragement!

I finished The Comedy of Errors. This is a really short play (75 pages), but the Signet Classics version I read also had Menaechmi by Plautus, a lengthy introduction (I must have read that introduction 4 times and still keep learning new things), and a bunch of commentaries. The play was alright. I'm convinced you have to see Shakespeare performed, the only plays of his I'm really enamored of are the ones that I've seen performed.

Six to go!

I finished The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which I'm not sure I understood fully, but in that way where I just want to read it again.

Five to go!

and 7 days, Rhea. You can do this.

I finished Bend Sinister, 4 to go.

I see that the eponymous Elizabeth Costello is also in Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, and The Lives of Animals was published first. I don't like to read books out of order like that and so I'll be reading A Man Without a Country instead of Elizabeth Costello.

I finished That Summer by Sarah Dessen and A Man without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut, two really short reads. The Dessen was her first work and kinda reads like it. A Man Without a Country is Vonnegut's random opinions that I recognize would find infuriating if I didn't already agree with them. Both were alright.

Bend Sinister had such beautiful phrases ("a sparrow all fluff and heart") but I didn't really enjoy reading it.

2 to go!

My used version of Babylon Revisited and Other Stories came with a piece of paper with a poem written on it:
"Life is a dome of
many-coloured glass
That stained the white
radiance of eternity until
death should shatter it."

Seems to be a variation on some lines from a Shelly poem:
"Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments."

I know you can do it. 2 books in 5 days is doable!

I finished Babylon Revisited and Other Stories, which was okay. A bunch of the stories were in All the Sad Young Men, so I'd read them already.

1 to go!

YES, YES!

I've finished Richard III and so I am done! This was my favorite of the three Shakespeare plays I read this year, so many great speeches. I want to see the film version with Ian MacKellen.

Thank you for your encouragement Connie, you are great! I wouldn't have stuck to my resolution if I didn't think you were watching me.

Yay, congratulations!

Congratulations!

You did it! Good for you.



"Thank you for your encouragement Connie, you are great! I wouldn't have stuck to my resolution if I didn't think you were watching me."

You are welcome, Rhea. I had fun watching and cheering. Maybe you remember that my goddaughter is called Rhea too. So i feel like an auntie when I see your thread.

you did it! Congratulations! Well done!!!!

hooray!