Ipsoivan presses on

This year my goal is 30 ROOTS, and I plan to make one each month a long book. In this way I hope to get to some of my long treasures that had to be passed over in 2013. Rereads are allowed, since I read some of my books so long ago that I've forgotten them.

ETA: The picture above represents both my first 2014 ROOT, Moby-Dick, and my personal struggle against the whale of my TBR.

ROOTS read:

Welcome Ipsoivan! Glad to see you are joining again.

Welcome back! I am also eyeing some rereads from my distant youth, I'm looking forward to see your choices.

Welcome back! Enjoy those longer books and rereads :)

Thanks, all! I'm looking forward to the challenge.

Great to see you here again

Thanks!

I need to work on some of my long books too. That's one of the reasons I joined this group and set a moderate goal. Hoping to move a few chunksters off the TBR shelf this year.

That is a great idea! Maybe I will go and count pages too. I feel the need for another ticker.

Oh, counting pages might really be a great motivator. I'm going to copy your ticker idea, connie. Earlier this year I remember moaning, perhaps to you?, about how few books I had to show for the amount of reading I'd done. I then realized that some of my ROOTs on my Kindle were 600-800 pp. long.

I also just found the TBR group, who read 12 books they've had for a long time, or ones they've wanted to read for a long time, over the course of the year. You post your list of 12 and 12 back-ups in case something you've chosen is a dud, and you stick with it! I am going to use it to plow through some seriously big books.

With ROOT and TBR, I should be seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.

>10 ipsoivan:. I don't remember if you moaned to me, Maggi. And please copy my ticker idea. I really like to follow your reading so I will go and search for the TBR group.

I don't do pages specifically for ROOT, I just do pages in general. So far this year I've read 73 books and 25,500 pages, so my average is about 350pgs per book, not bad, especially when several of them have actually been only at or a little under the 200 mark and bring the avg down! ;)

31.117 pages for 89 books for me this year. Average: 350 pages per book. Is that a coincidence or is that a coincidence?

I've been tracking my pages for several years and this year and I'm really down - not even 40,000 but with 3 new grandchildren I've been distracted from reading my books to reading theirs.

My lord, you 3 are amazing! Maybe I'll total up my 2013 pp tomorrow for fun, but I suspect I'm not in your league. I found myself reading a lot of short books to make my goals--rookie tactic, I suspect.

Hello Ipsoivan and good luck with your challenge. I am really looking forward to working mine this coming year.

Thanks, rainpebble. I dove into Moby-Dick last night, all fired up with 2014 ambition.

Ohhhhhhh, Moby Dick will be the death of me, literature-wise. I have begun him ever so many times and even come within 19 pages of the end once & yet never been able to complete the book. I guess I call that 'Reader's Block'! But hey, good luck to you with him.

Moby Dick's still sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read. Not sure if I will be ble to get to it this year. But I recently saw a BBC-movie version and really liked ig, so probably should be thinking of pulling it off the shelf.

ETA: Just saw that picture in the opening post. It looks wonderful, but I do feel sorry that some cut that bok, even if it was done so masterly.

Well, so far Moby-Dick is proving to be a lot of fun, although I have yet to hit the chapters that go into such detail about whaling. We'll see how I feel then.

>19 Tallulah_Rose: Tallulah, we can only hope that the book that was chosen was dreary, and that it has been transformed for the better. Google 'book art' and you can see some amazing things, that is, if you can tolerate the meeting of book and cutting tool.

Maybe is was a phonebook?

I googled 'book art' and there really are pieces of art, but I cannot say I feel positive about it. But beautiful it is nevertheless in it's own way.

Moby Dick was a challenge for me too. For some reason I had vowed to read it before I was 30. At some point in my 29th year, I realized that I was running out of time, so I started making myself read 1 chapter a day. There were parts of it that were absolutely fantastic...and other parts that would have been much more interesting if I was contemplating a career in whaling.

> 21 22 Nice thought, connie, but I suspect real books were destroyed in making this art.

>22 Tallulah_Rose: Tallulah, as a lover of the visual as well as the literary, I seem to have turned a blind eye to the evisceration of books here, but I suspect they were headed for landfill anyway, given the financial state of most artists I know. And publishers produce a lot of books that are only intended as tax write-offs--not all that is bound is worth the paper. Turn it to good use, I say.
However, I apologize for my insensitivity to all who view this image with pangs for their beloved books!

>shinyone, i'll persevere and maybe do some skimming. Luckily, my edition has some really nice illustrations to break up possible tedium.

Welcome and good luck with your ROOT! I don't currently have a copy of Moby Dick, but it is one I often think about...I started it as a teenager, but found it too slow and never finished reading it.

>22 Tallulah_Rose:, 24 I am remembering back when I worked at a place that had books to sell. There was one time when the books weren't moving no matter how cheaply we priced them. I was so very relieved when some women came and took away several boxes of them to turn them into 'book safes'. (That involved somehow gluing the pages after first hollowing out the middle of the pages.) This, to me, was so much better than turning books into garbage! I didn't even have the authority to take them for recycling. They would have mouldered and rotted in a dump.

>25 Tess_W: well, so far it is fairly light and tons of fun. More rolicking adventure than edifying tome. I have yet to be educated in all aspects of the whaling industry. I'm taking it nice and slow.

> 26 merryann, I guess the lesson is that books are paper and glue + ideas and art. We can love both, but the second part of the equation is less ephemeral than the first part.

>27 ipsoivan:, regarding my 26: That is a very nice thought for me to shut this computer off and go to sleep at a (somewhat) decent time tonight on. :)

I am a bit ambivalent about some book art, but when I see some of those (like the one in your first post), they just make me happy (I think "being relevant to a book" helps my acceptance :) )

Good luck in your pursuit of Moby Dick, and your whale of a TBR pile! I read it a while back. I found some parts a bit, ah, challenging . . . or something. But there's a good story in there among the whaling details.

Well, if the books where heading for landfill, I agree that it'd be better to turn them into something beuatiful and nice to look at. And it definitely helps if the books is changed into something that has to do with it's original content. That would definitely give it yet another sense of beauty.

Hello my friend! How's Moby Dick going? I have the graphic novel version written for young adults hanging out with other books waiting to be read. (Got it at Dollar Tree. Their book section is phenomenal!)

Hi Merryann, oh, Moby Dick has sucked me in. I'm at p. 554, closing in on the kind-of-almost-near-end. It is slow going in places, as others have commented, but I find myself thinking about things like whale skin and vats of spermaceti at odd moments in the day. There is a description of the slaughter of an old whale that is incredibly moving. It is a very odd book. Melville seems to be trying to show us whaling as a microcosm. Lots of folk-philosophy, and a glorification of an American ideal that does not always hold up well under scrutiny.

Ok, that's my review before I'm even finished it. I love this book.

Sorry about the radio silence at this end. Work has been brutal, but I'm hoping it will settle down soon. Moby Dick has been a fine distraction.

Today I was out for a walk and stopped in at a used bookstore I like. I escaped with only 3: Kate Atkinson's Life after Life, Turgenev's Virgin Soil, and a nice Everyman edition of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Les librairies sont dangereuses!

Glad you are back, Maggi.

Thanks, glad to be back. This may be only a temporary respite. My boss is crazy.

Hahaha. Lots of luck with your boss.

I need it.

I send you luck with your boss also. Actually, I am fortunate in that I do not currently have a boss, so I hereby dump all my unneeded 'boss luck' into a box for you. It's a pointy, spiky box, so hold it carefully, and if things get too rough, put it on a chair and then tell the boss, "Don't sit in that chair!"

That should produce the desired results.

** hmpff (proest)** That's me giggling!

Merryann, you are really priceless!

I've three 'bosses'who think I'm their boss ;-))

Well that's good! Sounds like you have them well in hand! :)

I waiver in my relationship with mine. She is truly a nice woman, seems to want the best for the students, yet puts all her energy into making things very complex. Guess who gets to deal with the consequences!

I will gladly take your spiky box, Merryann, for those days when I am *that* close to homicide.

I am still reading Moby Dick, by the way. I really like the slower pace it forces on me. And unlike many who have commented on the book, the whaling digressions can be fascinating if you aren't in a hurry to get to the adventure. They also reveal something of Ishmael and his own obsessiveness, despite the fact that it is Ahab who is always given the 'monomania' label.

#1 Moby-Dick

Woo hoo! This sure took a while. I've added comments to the January ROOT thread #2, but I'll also paste them here.

I started Moby-Dick (can't for the life of me figure out why it has the hyphen in the title but nowhere else in the book) on Jan. 1. It was a whopping 823 pp., much of it to be taken extraordinarily slowly to stay alert to what Melville might be up to.

Many others on LT have commented that they did not enjoy the middle section, which really is most of the book, because it goes into whaling details that don't really add much to the novel. But, as Melville spells out, this isn't really an adventure story, but an allegory. Of course he is so good at the adventure bits, we just want more of them. I did find much of the whaling detail weirdly entrancing.

This is just an incredibly odd book. I love it.

You did it! Way to go! 823 pages. Wow! And I bet it feels so satisfying to have read it and enjoyed reading it. Congratulations.

It does! I've been enjoying the finish all day. And on my way home from work I started a new one that promises to be great. I'm loving the looooong read at this point--a total immersion in a new world.

Woo hoo!!! Job wel done! ** Cheering**

Woot!

>45 ipsoivan:, "a total immersion in a new world"

What a lovely concept!

>46 connie53:, 47, 48 Thank you, ladies!

I'm currently sidetracked by a library book, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better by Carl Honoré. I'm trying to convince my boss (yes, THAT one) to take the long view on our shared project so that she stops causing problems with quick fixes. Merryann, if this doesn't work, I'm getting out the spiky box. connie, I may need tips in convincing her that she not only works for me, but she works for the students!

It has some very good reviews, so I predict you will not need the spiky box. :)

Ohh, I really understand about long view and quick fixes. That is something our school does too. They just fix little things without looking at the grand total. I hope the book helps!

Well, let me amaze you. I sat down with her on Monday and outlined for her why her current quick fix is not working, and did my best to explain that she should not focus our research on what we can do right now, but be more analytical, take the long view, and think in terms of 5 years. We need qualitative, not quantitative data.

And she went for it.

At least for now.

I'm just shuddering with awe, Maggie! Yes, you can do the boss thing too.

:)

Wonderful! Way to go! Very impressive, and the best thing is everyone benefits from your intelligent persuasivenes: you, the students, and the boss. :)

There has been relative calm in our department this week. I SO hope this lasts!

Keeping my fingers crossed for that, Maggie!

Well, I gave up on The Recognitions today. Life is too short to spend struggling with books that we keep hoping will become more enjoyable.

The beginning was enjoyable: the eccentric father, glimpses of the mother (what she does with her earrings reveals so much about her!), and the Barbary ape in the barn, Wyatt's early years, all of these gave me a great deal of reading pleasure. The next section, with Wyatt married in New York, the continual struggle of his wife to understand and accept him--well, that's where I found myself avoiding reading, not a good sign.

Gaddis seems to have a thing for over-development of some situations and some characters, seen in this section and earlier with the religious mania of Aunt May. This is surprising with a writer who can also show such restraint.

Well, I'm counting this as one off the TBR pile, as it is off the pile. On to, I hope, something better!

I would count it too! And I hope your next book is more entertaining.!

If I read 50 pages of a book and it is painful and I don't see any hope of it getting better...I count is as read, rate it low and move on. You are so right, life is too short to struggle enjoying a book!

I'm already enjoying A Fine Balance. It's nice to return to an absorbing book. Moby-Dick was absorbing in parts, but I was always aware that I was reading. Then The Recognitions, well...

This one seems to be doing the trick!

I took a break from A Fine Balance, in part because I've been laid up with the flu, and in part because I needed a break from so much sadness. I consoled myself with some Simon Serrailler mysteries--maybe not the best choice because they are both compulsively readable, and because they are so sad. I'm glad I've discovered them.

Sorry to hear you are not feeling good. Here's some orange juice and a cup of steamy brothy soup with little flecks of green healthy herby things floating on the top. Hope that helps.

Get better soon, Maggi. Een wankel evenwicht is going up on the TBR, despite is being sad

Ladies, your good wishes and Merryann's soup seem to have done the trick. I am on the mend, but still stuck into the Simon Serrailler series. I'm hoping to break free after i finish the 4th, as A Fine Balance is so very good and does not deserve my neglect.

I finished The Risk of Darkness today while my students were working on an essay. Compulsive, I know, but I did keep an eye out for questions.

I wish I could read on the job! But whenever I'm in a class with students I have to keep two eyes on them to see they don't crib (is that the word?).

What do you teach, Connie and Ipsoivan?

I'm glad the soup helped.

Connie, I've heard the word 'crib' used as a form of cheating. Is that what you're saying?

> 68 I teach academic communication, especially writing, to students at university whose first language isn't English. I have the best class this semester! All struggling, focused, eager to figure out how to express ideas in English that are bottled up in their heads.

I'm mean when students are trying to see what their classmate is writing down on his paper. And copying it!

>68 Tess_W: Tess, I don't teach. I am an assistent to the study counselors and, among other things, I have to test children between 12 and 18 (we have about 1600 students at our school) to find out where their talents are or what their favourite professions are, what kind of study they want to follow.

The class teachers can ask for this particular test when they are not sure if the child is on the right spot (we have several levels of education available at our school) A few times a year there are enough applications to fill a classroom. And I spend a morning with them (this morning I coached another group of them)

We do have diverse careers, but all working with students. I teach students aged 15-18 World and American History-college prep. I also teach Western Civilization at the local university one night per week. I teach a semester course on the Holocaust in which I developed the curriculum myself. Now one might see why I read a lot of historical fiction!

>70 ipsoivan:, 71 it's rewarding work, isn't it? When it's going well, that is... Other times I feel like packing it in, but never for long.

>72 Tess_W: Tess, any favourite historical fiction that you can recommend?

#73 .....so many and my tastes are very eclectic!

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan--about foot binding in ancient China
The Pillars of the Earth
The Alienist
Winds of War and Winds o Remembrance by Herman Wouk
Anything by James Michener....but especially Hawaii, Texas, and Chesepeake
The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
Shogun
The Clan of the Cave Bear
Anything by Colleen McCullough (The Thorn Birds, Rome series (Grass Crown, etc)
Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies
Preacher's Boy
Shanghai Escape
Carolina Gold

I will not stop!

Wow! Thanks so much.

My non-ROOTS reading has taken over this month. If I had put all this into ROOTS, I'd be a third of the way done for the year.

Back to ROOTS now. I will keep my eye off library books...

Happy ROOTing!

Oh dear. Another library hold just became available! I guess I just need to work on balance and read a bit of my current long ROOT everyday.

I'm just working on my balance, reading and posting, too Maggie.

It's a challenge on it's own.

I just finished A Fine Balance. Such an overwhelmingly sad book, but brilliant. Connie, you are in for such a treat!

I'm looking forward to it, Maggie!

One quickie finished, The Meat Fix, a kind of blokeish Nina Planck.

Tickers updated.

Quartet in Autumn. I do so love Barbara Pym, or at least the ones that I've read.

4 elderly people whose lives barely seem to overlap in their shared office work, yet who are also surprisingly close, continue to think about each other after the retirement of the two women. One of those books in which not a lot happens, but which is quietly resonant.

Sounds lovely, Maggie!

Ok, I won't finish antthing more tonight. My total of ROOTS for the month is 5, and all tickers were updated.
Thanks, cheli!

Oh dear, another library book read, not a ROOT. I am not doing so well resisting book bullets! My current ROOT is the delightful Pale Fire, but I keep getting notices of reserves at the library that are distracting. I WILL continue tonight with Pale Fire, and perhaps finish it in the next day or two, then onto my long read for March.

I WILL support you in this attempt, Maggie! You go for it!!

Thanks, Connie. I closed my eyes and pressed the buttons to return 2 library reserves unread and just focused on Pale Fire yesterday... but today I opened my email and found another reserve bumping around in there. Not too much of PF to go, so I went ahead and downloaded it.

All reading is good. :)

Ok, Pale Fire finished. Funny, crazy, and quite beautiful. On one level it consists of a poem written by an eminent poet and commentary on the poem written by a scholarly fan. The poem is clumsy, the commentary ludicrous and totally unconnected to the poem. But the poem is, in part, quite lovely, and the commentary turns into a wild adventure story. Madness ensues, beautifully written.

> 89 I succumbed to another library book, and it was certainly good! Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch. The first of what looks to be a great series.

>91 ipsoivan: It is such a fun series! I hope you continue to enjoy it :)

Hi rabbitprincess, I loved the first. The second is on reserve from the library. Do I need to say that I keep checking my email to see if it's in?

Pale Fire looks interesting. Another book bullet. :)

I finished the incredibly sad and lovely Blue Nights by Joan Didion last night, reading in tandem with The Brothers Karamazov. It doesn't count as a ROOT, as I borrowed it from the library. I'm enjoying Karamazov a lot, but I do find I'm wearying of my pledge to read only long books for the TBR Challenge. Yes, they are getting read, but psychologically it is a slog, even if I like the books.

>94 Merryann: Merry Ann, Pale Fire is really recommended. Odd, but wonderful.

Ipsoivan, I too, only choose BIG (physically) books for my TBR challenge. So far, they have all been good, but as you, they are wearing on me. I have found that I am having to read 2 books at once, an enjoyable quick read on my Kindle, and the BIG book.

>96 Tess_W: >95 ipsoivan: That's what I try to do too.

Hi you two, I worry that if I lapse on the big ones I have on the go, I will lose focus. I've SO lost focus that I've indulged in far more library books than last year, so it's not like my method is working!

Wow! I finally finished The Brothers Karamazov. Much of it brilliant, but enough that was irritating that I really dragged my heels on this. Short books for me for a while.

Yes, reward yourself!

Thanks, tess. I have so much catching up to do for ROOT. I intend to do a blitz of short ones that will put some wind in my sails. I am doing only long books for the TBR group, and they are really taking a toll on my reading mojo. I have a few weeks of slower time at work right now, so I intend to make the most of it!

I had to do that after I finished Bleak House and Great Expectations, took about a 6 month break and read easy, short, delightful books!

I have 8 long books left in my TBR Challenge commitment. Urgh. I won't be able to take 6 months off, but at least a few weeks!

>101 ipsoivan: you and I, Maggie. I've only read books that are big ones. So It takes forever to finish them. And I'm really behind with ROOting!

I'm scouring my shelves for short unread books to get back on track. Unfortunately it's usually the long ones I put off, so there aren't too many!

Congratulations on finishing another long book! I agree with everyone saying you've definitely earned some nice, short reads. :)

>104 connie53: Connie, you're well ahead of me, for all your long books. Heads down, we WILL get those long ones polished off eventually.

>105 Jackie_K: Jackie, that was me last year, so that's why I made the vow to read the long ones. Well, they are just going to have to wait their turn while I get some more short and medium ones taken care of and get back on track.

>106 Merryann: Thanks, Merryann. I just finished my first shorty. Cause for much quiet rejoicing on my part. I'll start a new one today.

I finished another ROOT this morning, Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. I must get my hands on more by her.

Angel Deverell begins writing to escape her prosaic life as a teenager, and to everyone's surprise but her own, becomes a best selling author. Taylor has some fun suggesting just how terrible Angel's novels are, but the focus of the novel is on the character of Angel herself and her small circle of family and friends who veer between oddly protective love of her and exasperation and despair at just how awful she is.

Angel would likely see her circle as minor supporting characters in the grand drama that is her life, but Taylor quietly goes about filling in their details: Theo, her publisher; Esmé her husband; Nora, Esmé's sister and Angel's companion till death; Angel's chauffeur and foil, Marvell; even the dogs and cats of the household are beautifully filled in.

A wonderful book, and the intro by Hilary Mantel in the NYRB edition is also lovely.

>107 ipsoivan: Of course we will!

I've just finished Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi , another great NYRB novel.

Skylark, unmarried, 35, and still living with her parents, goes to visit relatives for a week. In her absence, her parents indulge in lost pleasures that they had abandoned. On the final night, however, her father has a sudden insight about Skylark that he shares with his wife. The final chapters--well, I don't want to give anything away. Great book.

Most of the book is wonderfully sensual--food, theatre, cards, drinking, all against the backdrop of small town Hungarian life in 1899.

Maggie, you are just so cool! Even your shorter books are very thought-provoking books. I read some of the reviews on Skylark and ended up feeling so very sorry for her.

Sounds like a wonderful book. I am adding it to my list........sigh!

>111 Merryann: Merryann, I'm not sure reading Skylark puts me in the category of cool, but thanks! Read it and you can be cool too. However I'm not so sure that I agree with some of the other reviewers, but I'm not going to be precise about my disagreement, as it might spoil the book for you, and after all, we all read the same book differently.

>112 Tess_W: Tess, I couldn't recommend it more! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Just finished ROOT 11, Spiderweb by Penelope Lively.

By habit and temperament detached and self-sufficient, Stella has retired from her career as a social anthropologist studying kinship and social connection around the world. She settles, for the first time in her adult life, in a cottage in Somerset and, as usual, stands on the outside studying the web of local customs. Her main contacts are Richard, the widower of her old friend Nadine, and Judith, an archaeologist, but we also see, through memories of her former friends, lovers and subjects of her professional scrutiny, why she made the choices she has made and why she is the way she is now.

In one sense, the spiderweb, then, is the web of human relations that she has studied professionally. In another, it is the web that is her past and the new web she tentatively begins to build in her new community.

Running parallel to Stella's story is that of the Hiscox boys who live down the lane and are caught in the web of their awful mother....

Interesting book, the dark side of British cozy communities.

#23 The Janissary Tree Not a ROOT, alas, but my last library reserve book. I'll try to keep away from the library books for now to boost my ROOT numbers.

Good plan, Maggi. Stay away from the enticements of the library! Concentrate on those poor ROOTs that have been waiting patiently on the shelves!

One more to add for April, Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary.

Sara Monday is a sweet-natured rogue, a kind of 20th century Moll Flanders, and this is the story of her career as cook, wife, artist's muse and... well, no spoilers. Sara always seems to turn her setbacks into benefits to herself and to those she loves; it's a pleasure to see how her mind works. She is, however, a surprise to herself--hence the title.

One of the beauties of the book is Sara's gift of description. Here is a random sample:

The sun was so bright as a new gas-mantle--you couldn't look at it even through your eyelashes, and the sand so bright gold as deep-fried potatoes. The sky was like washed-out Jap silk and there were just a few little clouds coming out on it like down feathers out of an old cushion; the rocks were so warm as new gingerbread cakes and the sea had a melty thick look, like oven glass.

I've updated all tickers.

Wow-that is certainly richly descriptive!

>And there are so many passages like that! This book is such a pleasure to read.

I've just finished Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks, the story of John Brown's family's fight for abolition, and a character study of Brown senior and his third son, Owen, who narrates the novel. I didn't know any of the history before this, and have no idea how factual it is, but I'm not sure it matters really, as much of the book is more to do with their relationship and the struggle Owen has with his own nature than with historical fact. We see as well John Brown's sacrifice of his sons--a constant thread is the story Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac.

I will be thinking about this for a long time.

Now I'm curious! What was Owen struggling with? I can't really find anything about that through Google.

Banks makes it clear that this is his own interpretation of history, so I doubt you'll find mention of it in the web, whiich does not contain much about Owen.

I'll try to answer without spoilers, but will have to be a bit vague. Initially, he is not drawn completely into the Abolitionist cause and is rebelling against his father. He is also struggling with his friendship with a black friend. Later he is his father's most staunch supporter and, looking back at the end of his life, struggles with his role in the events in Kansas and Harper's Ferry.

There, so vague as to be almost meaningless. Read the book--it's amazingly good.

I just finished ROOT 14, Huckleberry Finn, which I started when I was an undergraduate student. It has some good bits, but I remain underwhelmed, which is, I guess, why I've left it this long to finish. Twain has a way of riding a joke for far too long--like about 50 pages with his spoof of romances like The Man in the Iron Mask. Yes, there is some outrage about slavery, but the book just can't decide what to be.

A heretical position, I know.

I, too, ipsoivan, was disaffected by Huck Finn. I know it is an American classic, but like The Sun Also Rises, sighhh, yawn, etc.

>124 Tess_W: Oh boy, and I was thinking of giving Hemingway another try at some point. I'll take your word for it and check it out of the library instead of looking for it second-hand.

A red-letter day for me. I finished 2 books in one day. Well, ROOT 15 is a short one, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. A great way to recover from Huckleberry Finn. This one has been sitting on my shelf since 1991.

This book is full of yearning; everyone in it longs to be someone else, to live somewhere else other than this street in the Hispanic slum of a nameless American city. Most of the women look for a man who will take them away; Esperanza's escape is her poems and stories, especially about the women around her.

"When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are."

#16 Brighten the Corner Where You Are by Fred Chappell. I am so glad I picked this off the shelf--what a weird, funny little story. It's a bit of of a spin on Joyce's Ulysses, as it is a day in the life of Joe Robert Kirkman that begins well before dawn and ends late at night in bed dreaming with his wife. His adventures include a lot of slapstick and philosophizing, and quite a bit of mystery and magic. It's beautifully written, funny, sad, and altogether really smart.

Why isn't this writer better known?

>122 ipsoivan: Thanks for explaining! Now I know on which subject the struggle was.

Just finished another library book, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones. Not a ROOT, but good.

I just finished a semi-ROOT-let that I am counting as a full ROOT.

A student came to see me today, and we talked about a wonderful essay she had read in The Guardian, "I Have Killed My Books". Ok, bear with me here. The article is written by a novelist, Linda Grant, who moved to another apartment and succumbed to the idea of purging her library to downsize and because she was seduced by the idea of a fresh start. She is also a Kindle user. But the title of her piece says it all--she is now overcome by remorse.

I googled the article and found out that it is an excerpt from a Kindle single; I bought it on the spot and read it in less than an hour. Ok, it violates the hard-core ROOT ethos, that we try to read what we already have, but like many ROOTers, I want to read my new books before they become ROOTs as well. So it is a semi-ROOT. It is also really short, hence the -let.

To balance this out, I am also reading Burney's Cecilia, all 900+ pages. I won't be done by the end of the month, alas!

I just finished a semi-ROOT-let that I am counting as a full ROOT.

A student came to see me today, and we talked about a wonderful essay she had read in The Guardian, "I Have Killed My Books". Ok, bear with me here. The article is written by a novelist, Linda Grant, who moved to another apartment and succumbed to the idea of purging her library to downsize and because she was seduced by the idea of a fresh start. She is also a Kindle user. But the title of her piece says it all--she is now overcome by remorse.

I googled the article and found out that it is an excerpt from a Kindle single; I bought it on the spot and read it in less than an hour. Ok, it violates the hard-core ROOT ethos, that we try to read what we already have, but like many ROOTers, I want to read my new books before they become ROOTs as well. So it is a semi-ROOT. It is also really short, hence the -let.

To balance this out, I am also reading Burney's Cecilia, all 900+ pages.

Here, by the way, is a link to the article that sparked my interest:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/17/linda-grant-author-killed-books-lib...

D/l the Kindle single! It's a never ending circle!

>131 ipsoivan: I like that phrase "intellectually greedy" in your answer on the May thread. Now when anyone asks me why I have so many books I can just tell them that I am "intellectually greedy" LOL. I am fortunate to live in a three story townhouse and most of my books live downstairs so the average visitor doesn't get to see them which is probably a good thing as there is always a stack or three of new books waiting to be shelved.

I know what you mean finding spaces for books, though. I can still remember all the books I had in my room when living at home, my mother went in and purged them when I went away to school - I think that is even worse than purging them yourself.

>134 Familyhistorian: oh, the horror of having someone else purge your books! No one else knows what place each individual book holds in your heart! It's like removing a piece of your experience and your identity.

>135 ipsoivan: It did feel like some of my experiences had been erased and I didn't have that many of them to fall back on because I was in my early 20's at the time.

# 18 Gothic Riffs, something I've read for a work-related writing project. Still a ROOT, though!

Lordy! I just finished Cecilia--all 948 pp of it. For the most part I loved it, but the last 300 pp or so did drag--alright already, enough verbal coitus interruptus--get those two married! The plot twists became more and more absurd as Burney struggled to draw it out.

Interesting, though, to see what a huge influence this book had on Austen. Even PRIDE and PREJUDICE (her capitals) twice in one paragraph at the end.

>138 ipsoivan: You intrigue me. But 948 pages is a daunting prospect. Still, that's one for the TBR.

>139 MissWatson: You probably need to have read and enjoyed some other 18th century fiction to be willing to tackle such a long one. However, if you've read Evelina this is certainly worth a try. Evelina is much shorter and funnier. The funny parts are also in Cecilia, but she rides them too long--something that could be said of the whole book--and Cecilia is much more of a melodrama. I guess once Burney was established with Evelina, she had to prove herself as a serious author with Cecilia, and to her that meant the 3 volume treatment and a heightened tone of importance.

ETA: Another thing that makes this book interesting and worth reading, besides the Austen connection, is the struggle you can see here between obedience to the old hierarchies of society and the reaction against them. This was published in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

>140 ipsoivan: That's one more reason to put it on the TBR. Anyway, it's probably an easier read than Die Leiden des jungen Werther or Les liaisons dangereuses?

>140 ipsoivan: I have yet to read either Werther or Liaisons, although I do have Liasons on the shelf--soon! Not a tough read, really, just long and very wordy in the way that a lot of 18th century literature is.

I just read a library book, High Fidelity, about as far from Cecilia as you can get. Loads of fun, highly recommended, but not a ROOT, alas.

Library books just keep pulling me in. I finished The Ocean at the End of the Lane last night, and today will finish Charles Taylor's The Malaise of Modernity. I do have a couple of ROOTS on the go, Austerlitz, (weird and fascinating) and The Spell (weird and fascinating too). I really will make every effort to finish both this week, but I have a couple more library books on the table that look really good.

Yet another library book, Stoner. Well worth straying away from ROOT, though. When I return the current batch today, I will be strong and NOT go upstairs to check out the shelves.

My LAST library book--at least for now: The Clothes On their Backs by Linda Grant. I wanted to read one of her novels after I read her Kindle short, I Murdered my Library. It was good, but I felt guilty. Got to get back to my ROOTs.

Ok, my long read for June is done: The Spell by Hermann Broch. There's a good book in there fighting its way through a lot of mystical (mystifying) prose.

The basic premise is a doctor telling the events of 9 months in a mountain village, and yes, 9 months is significant in just the way you might think--there is a unifying thread of death, renewal and nature. A man has come to the village from outside who is clearly mad, and he unifies most of the villagers around a kind of Fascist rhetoric of blood and earth. The problem for me is that the opposing figure, Mother Gisson, uses a similar rhetoric, although hers is life-affirming, and this is where the mystification sets in -- what in the world are they saying?

Much of the book is really engrossing, and there are passages of astounding beauty, but there are also whole sections that you read and reread, trying to extract any meaning. Apparently Broch did not intend this version of the book to be published, and was rewriting it before his death. There is also a section in the middle that really does not seem to fit in with the rest of the book that tells the doctor's back story. Broch's son, the translator, decided to add it, but I don't think it was a good choice.

ROOT 21, Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald.

Austerlitz and the unnamed narrator (more a recorder of Austerlitz's story) meet, both by chance and by plan, over three decades in various places in Europe. Austerlitz is a mesmerizing, driven talker, holding forth for hours about abstruse topics, but has little idea (at first) of who he is. About half way through, he begins to piece together his history as one of the children who escaped Czechoslovakia by Kindertransport at the age of 4 1/2, and for the rest of the novel he tells the narrator of his efforts to learn of his past--at least that's what seems to be going on here. However, as there are a number of digressions about the task of capturing knowledge, history and material artifacts, and how it ends in such aberrations as the Nazi cataloguing of goods and lives, and the monstrous Bibliotheque National in France, his individual attempt to recover his past is perhaps not without its negative aspects.

The structure of the novel is interesting: the whole novel is written in a few paragraphs--e.g. the first break comes on p. 32. Within these 'paragraphs' are a number of topics, which might change within the space of a sentence, as Austerlitz follows tangents of thought. Also illuminating the text are a number of black and white photographs that capture some of the emotion that Austerlitz's narration cannot. The effect--the lack of paragraphing, the long digressive sentences, and the photographs--is at first confusing, but eventually reveals something of the inner landscape of Austerlitz's mind.

Fascinating book.

This is on my Holocaust shelf......never got around to it.......and from your description, I may not! I don't like I book where I don't know where it's going!

Oh, I would persevere. It's a kind of Holocaust for advanced Holocaust readers, as it is less about the Holocaust itself and more about the aftereffects on memory in Europe. It's very clearly written, but at the beginning you struggle to sort the material (no paragraphs). Soon it all falls into place.

>150 Tess_W: I feel like I haven't really done it justice in either post I've done on it, and I'm not sure I can.

All the pieces fit together, so eventually you see how Austerlitz's (and the narrator's) digressions on zoos, animal collections, the architecture of the capitalist era (Austerlitz's professional specialty)--all these diverse topics shed an oblique light on the Holocaust--and the lack of paragraphs shows us how they are all connected.

I'm going to be thinking about this one for a long time. I keep pulling it down from the shelf to reread sections and think about how they connect.

ROOT 22 The Paper Men by William Golding. At first I thought this was Golding's take-down of more commercially successful writers and the academics who use them to launch their careers, but by the end I was impressed--Golding pulls it off again, taking what might have been a well-written farce into deeper territory.

ROOT 23 The March by E.L. Doctorow

The novel recounts Sherman's marches, first to the sea, then to Virginia, and the culmination of the Civil War.

Doctorow uses his usual strategy of picking several characters out of the flow, telling the bigger story through their separate experiences. It's particularly effective here. We see the march through the eyes of freed slaves, southern women who are swept along with the army, medical staff, soldiers, generals... The characterizations are amazing. I gulped this down in just a little over a day.

oh! I thought I'd already star'd your page, apparently not!
But I found it :)
I have The Paper Men on my shelf and have been curious for a while how it is.. thanks for your thoughts!
(I've also got The March... sounds like my "read next" pile has a few contenders...)

Enjoy!

#24 Monsieur by Lawrence Durrell. I'm quitting halfway through. What a lot of hokum.

Durrell's chief characteristic in this book is hyperbole. He can't just write about a relationship. It has to be a ménage a trois--no wait!--make it better! an incestuous ménage a trois with madness thrown in. Set it in France--no wait!--an ancient chateau in the ancient city of Avignon, so you get all the frisson of decadent European aristocracy. Death--no wait!--suicide, much better--or wait! make that a possible murder. Some doubt and philosophy--no wait!--better yet cryptic Gnosticism with snakes and hallucinations in the Egyptian desert. I understand from someone else's review that these overdrawn characters will turn out to be characters in a novel by another character. How excitingly postmodern. And did I mention that he packs it with his most overwrought language?

I'm putting it down now--no wait!--I'm going to burn it on a pyre while chanting paeons to the Prince of Darkness.

hee hee, hokum.
I hate books like that.

Just checking in to say that I'm about a fifth of the way through Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. This may take a while, but I'm loving it.

ROOT #25
I finally finished Mason and Dixon. It's bizarre, and very, very long, yet if you are willing to zoom through parts that you don't entirely get (or reread them until you have an inkling what they say), it's really enjoyable.

What's it about? Well, on the surface it tells of the long relationship between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, surveyors of the infamous Mason and Dixon Line in the mid 18th century.

It's also about lines and divisions, the forces that work through them and against them--so the book joins together physical and metaphysical, and Pynchon has a lot of fun playing with them.

And yes, it is playful; half the fun of the book is spotting the ridiculous lapses between the 'real' story that is being told by the Rev. Cherrycoke (yes, Pynchon has fun with names) and the various 'inner' stories, some more clearly fictional than others, as well as spotting references to, or untangling, myth, pop culture, and 'reality'. Just a few examples: fictional characters in a book a 'real' character is narrating wander into the 'real' events; someone flashes a Vulcan salute, "Live Long and Prosper", complete with a description of the hand gesture; Popeye is spotted briefly in a bar. Is that a Golem? Who exactly is Stig the Axman? Is Dixon always pulling Mason's leg with his wild tales?

It's all completely baffling, quite hilarious, and in the end, quite moving.

After finishing Mason and Dixon, I needed a real change. I downloaded The Library Book from, appropriately, my library. It is a bit uneven, but on the whole quite rewarding. It's a compilation of short pieces by various writers, mostly British, mostly about the influence of libraries and reading in their lives; it was written to raise money and awareness about the threat to the British public library system under Cameron's Conservative government. As our own dear mayor (NOT) has also made noises about closing libraries in Toronto, it was appropriate. Some very good pieces by writers I had heard of and others I hadn't. I think my favourite was by Stephen Fry. This does not qualify as a ROOT, alas.

ROOT 26: The Good Soldier. Worthwhile just to try to figure out how Ford manages to establish a character's qualities only to sweep them away deftly in the next sentence.

I loved it, even if it made for painful reading.

I think that when I reach my ROOT goal (just 5 more books!) I will take on a new challenge: reading the oldest ROOTS on my shelves. There are some that I've been staring at for about 37 years. Those that I read will be added to the Group results, and I will feel some relief.

I've recently reread part of Susan Hill's Howard's End is on the Landing, and I long to be able to KNOW these books in the way that she writes of, not just know their covers.

LOL to 37 years......I can laugh at you because I think I have some as old! And my "old" ones are very big, like War and Peace, The Gulag Archipelago, etc.

Mine are some things I was supposed to have read for one class or another in my undergrad years. Right now, one of those, which I am reading now, is The Immoralist: it is actually really good. I think I just read the first 40pp or so for my class in Modernist Fiction sometime in the 70s.

>157 ipsoivan: I am still laughing. What a delightful review of the book!

>127 ipsoivan:, When I read this I thought, "I don't own this book, but the author's name sounds familiar." Turns out I recently listed his book I Am One of You Forever. I'm much more excited at the thought of reading it having read your comments regarding the author.

>166 Merryann: well hello there! Yes, if I can steer you away from Monsieur and towards Chappell, I have done a good service, in my opinion.

ROOT #27: The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. Not a long-standing ROOT: I first learned of it last year. What a lovely story! I gobbled this one down. Witty, wonderful characterization, clever plotting, oh, and beautiful descriptions.

ROOT#28: The Immoralist by André Gide. I’m not sure how I feel about this one. It tells the story of Michel, newly married to Marcelline, who contracts TB on his honeymoon. After he recovers his health in North Africa, he gradually embarks on a quest for a more authentic life which, in his case, means developing his sensual capacity and a taste for anything that seems illicit and runs counter to his former life of scholarship. There’s a desolate feeling of emptiness here: what once gave meaning and satisfaction is lost, and his new life is full of sad, aimless dissipation and loss. Depressing.

>169 ipsoivan: That does sound depressing! I'm going to go read another page of my humorous Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? to wash that out of my head. Geez, poor guy. Actually, poor wife, lol.

Hah, Merryann, it sounds like Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops is diametrically opposed to The Immoralist. Happy reading!

#29 Life After Life. What an amazing book. I'm going to be vague here to avoid spoilers, but I think it was sheer genius to put that opening sequence in so that the reader is constantly trying to figure out how Ursula will finally fulfill her destiny. And the leitmotifs that signal the end of each cycle...

One of my top books for this year.

What a nice selection of books! Enchanted April sounds nice... mayhaps a TBR addition....

>173 avanders: Highly recommended! It's one of those 'treat' books we all need in our lives.

oh, ok, twist my arm.... ;)
added! Also, hadn't realized it's a "classic"; since it is, I was able to get a *free* copy for my kindle! woot! :)

I know, free! Isn't that great?

I just finished my 30th ROOT--Continent by Jim Crace.

I've read later books by Crace, but this is his first. It's a set of linked short stories about a made-up continent; according to his Paris Review interview, he suddenly realized that he could really just make anything up after he read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whereas before he had been trying to write earnest social realism and not getting anywhere.

The stories are odd; I kept trying to find a theme to unite them, but wasn't really successful. I do notice (something he comments on in the interview) that he is interested in societies undergoing change; as well, there seems to be a kind of tension between characters in several of them, a struggle for mastery or dominance that doesn't quite reach equilibrium.

I'm visiting my family on the West Coast, so I'm in a different time zone and well under the wire.

This completes my ROOT challenge! All future ROOTs will be added to the group total.

Congratulations!

Thank you, Tess!

Well done!

Woo hoo!! Congratulations on finishing!!

Thanks, you two!

What an upbeat way to start your August! Congratulations! :)

Hurray! Congrats!

Congratulations on reaching your goal! WOOHOO!

Thanks to you all!

#31 Ok, I just finished Women in Love. VERY mixed feelings about this; it's a bit of a bodice ripper at points, mostly homoerotic, but in the end I actually did care what happened to the characters. It's just so overwritten.

So... with something that overwritten, where do you fall on your rating? is it middle-of-the-line, or does your care for the characters make up for the bad writing?

I'm not sure. For the first 2/3 of the book, I was reading particularly eye-rolling passages to whoever would listen, e.g.:

"With perfect fine fingertips of reality she would touch the reality in him, the perfect, pure untranslateable reality of his loins of darkness. To touch, mindlessly in darkness to come in pure touching upon the living reality of him, his suave perfect loins and thighs of darkness, this was her sustaining anticipation."

I mean, really, where do you start? All the men have "white loins" (when they aren't loins of darkness), and other exciting bits; but Lawrence kind of skips describing the women much beyond their clothing, which he pays a lot of attention to. Then later, the women start to become a bit more fleshed out, so to speak, and the tension between the characters becomes somewhat more understandable; also there are fewer white loins.

Rating?? Maybe 3 stars.

ewwww been there :P
That. Is. Terrible. Terrible. So so so so so bad. I can't believe you made it through! ;)

mmmmwhiteloins.

And he's rated so highly. Well, I guess he did introduce an impressionistic style into the novel. Now that I'm several days away from it, yeah, I wonder how I made it through.

#32 The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. This is a new favourite. It's so restrained, so smart. I'm going to reread it today--that's how good it is.

You know, sometimes things just strike us at certain times... for you it was the white loins ;) But maybe other people really liked the... er, white loins? So .. rated him highly? .. Yeah, sometimes I'm baffled by high scores :)

And, wow... you just finished a book and are going to immediately re-read? Must've been good!

>193 avanders: Oh, it was SO good. No white loins though. Not even a suave loin of darkness that your perfect fine fingertips of reality can touch, which as you point out, some might have wanted. Have you heard of The Summer Book? It was the group read for August for the 1001 books you must read before you die group. Not everyone was as positive about it as me.

lol! oh, the white loins...
I'm not sure.. sounds vaguely familiar.. I'll check it out! :)

#33 The House of Mirth. Good, but I'm not sure about the ending.

#34 Ok, that's it. The Man Without Qualities got a good effort from me, but... just no. It reminds me of the people who recommended it to me 25 years ago, a couple of Philosophy grad students who were as arid as this book. It's dry, intellectual, and completely lacking soul.

I hate to give up on books, but life is just too short, so out it goes.

tee hee "as arid as this book"... hope no one ever says that about me ;)

I know, it's kind of mean for me to say so. I'm sure they have improved with age (don't we all??) but at 25 these boys were, well, ehem.

Lol. Well if it's fair, it's fair...

#35 Between the Woods and the Water, the second of Patrick Leigh Fermor's trilogy about his walk from the Netherlands to Istanbul in the early 1930s. Wonderfully descriptive travelogue, with lots of history and meditations on culture thrown in.

Sounds so interesting.. May have to add that to library tbr!

Oh my goodness, the white loins...reminds me a bit of when I tried to read Lady Chatterley's Lover just to see what all the fuss was about and got so perplexed as to the daisy chains (or more particularly their placement) and how this qualified as anything but weird... but apparently it's par for the course for Lawrence?

>203 Caramellunacy: I'm not sure. I read Lady Chatterley many years ago and don't really remember it, but my imagination has settled on a particular place for the daisy chains that would certainly be par for the course for Lawrence.

My problem with him is mostly to do with his inflated language, inflated emotions, inflated... use your imagination!

#37 The New Confessions Well, this one was very long, and very good. It is the 'confession' of John James Todd, as old as the 20th century: traumatizing childhood in Scotland, soldier then photographer then prisoner of war in WWI, renowned filmmaker in Britain, Germany and the US, victim of the McCarthy era, photojournalist in Mexico and then Europe during WWII, expatriate living on a Mediterranean island in the 70s .... Lots of ground is covered.

What I especially loved about this is the detailed sections in which he describes his passion for Rousseau and his efforts to turn Rousseau's writings into film. The first film is his self-proclaimed masterpiece of the silent era, The Confessions Part 1, and the final, well, I won't say, as to do so could spoil the book for others. But I wish I could see these films. The description of the tossing of cherries into an actress's cleavage, and why that one shot was so important, is priceless.

Wonderful characters, oh my. This will stick with me for a while.

Sounds like a wonderful read!

>206 Tess_W: I certainly thought so.

>201 ipsoivan: I am intending to read Between the Woods and the Water as part of next year's ROOTing (I read "A Time of Gifts", the first in the series, many years ago, so will reread that first). Did you know that they have recently posthumously published the third (and final) book in the series? It's called "Broken Road".

>209 Jackie_K: Hi there, yes, I bought a copy as soon as I heard it had been published. I have no plans to read it immediately, but should do so before the memory of Between the Woods and the Water fades. I really loved it.

Just peeping in and saying HI!

>211 connie53: well hello there! I'm being bad and reading a library book, although it's an excellent one, The Luminaries. How are you?

lol, that's not being bad ;)
Glad to hear it's excellent! I am looking forward to reading that one myself... :)

>213 avanders:: I'm almost half-way through. It's kind of a literary murder mystery with some gussied-up symbolism that I have not yet figured out. I like some of the characters, but I'm not as blown away at this point as I expected to be. Well, there's still another 375 pp to change my mind!

I hope the next 375 pages are fantastic! :)

>215 avanders: Oh, they are SO fantastic I am going to buy my own copy. I'm still not finished, but I found somewhere in the middle of the book that things started to fall into place for me, and now I love it.

Yay! Glad to hear it! :)

#38 The Luminaries A puzzling read. This started out as a library book, but I liked it so much I bought my own copy, and will go back and reread parts to piece it all together. Highly recommended, and although new, I am counting it as a ROOT--for me, any book on my shelf counts for the challenge.

All tickers updated.

#39 In the Kitchen by Monica Ali. Absolutely loved it. I could barely talk to anyone this morning until I finished it.

#40 Travesties by Emma Tennant. This is an omnibus of The Bad Sister, Two Women of London and Faustine. A bit of a dud, I'm afraid. I've made it half way through The Bad Sister; I found it interesting at first, but when Jane's diary begins, I just found it a slog. It seemed so promising, then just fizzled out. Ah well, off the shelf and into the Goodwill bag.

>219 ipsoivan: intriguing!
Also, happy birthday! (belated)
(or.... have I lost my mind here? ;))

Thanks, not lost your mind at all. My bday is the same day as those of my stepson, my uncle in law and one of the cats. I decided this year I would celebrate for 4 days. It's been lovely.

That's a great idea! :)

Of course. More reasons to slack off and eat cake. Hmm, I think there might be a piece left...

lol mmm cake ;)

Drat, it was gone. I think it may well be time to come up with another celebration. And make more cake.

Definitely... You know, Veterans Day is next week....

Very (belated) happy 4 days of birthday, Ipsoivan!

>227 avanders: ; )
>228 connie53: Thanks, connie!

I just finished a library book, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. I'm not going to claim that it was great, but I think that Simonson is a talented writer in search of a good editor. Not the kind who will shorten a book, but one who will say, "Wait a minute, don't you think that you've got your time frames a bit mixed?" She has a few characters straight out of the 40s or 50s intermixed with characters from the 2000's. Mind you, I also don't live in a village in Britain, so what do I know?

I did enjoy the book up to a point, although I did a fair bit of eye-rolling.

Hmmm.... sounds kind of frustrating! I have that one on the shelves... for now.. ;)

I just finished another... library book, not a ROOT. Oh well, I really got a kick out of it. A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. I see that it was made into a film--it might be worth checking out, although from the trailer, it looks like a hatchet job on a really smart book.

Two more ROOTS done, The Mongoliad, parts one and two. Fun, but I'm not sure I will read part three.

Oh no! I'd heard such good things about that one!

You know, I really enjoyed the first book. Very swashbuckling. The second the flaws started to get to me just a bit. I think the issue of multiple authors was dealt with better in the first book with probably better editing. By the second, there were a few passages where the serial publication of the original was maybe haunting the print version, as it felt like they were treading water trying to figure out what to do. No character development to speak of either, so after a while, I was just, "I don't really care."

I finished Possession today. I was convinced I'd read it when it first came out; I picked it up for a reread, and I had absolutely NO recollection of any of it. Great book! I'm glad I've finally read it.

Interesting.. I didn't know that about multiple authors, but makes sense!

Possession.. By Byatt? I just got that at the library clearance sale :)

Good score, although it's sad to see a great book like that getting booted out of the library for not being read. Have you read The Children's Book?

No, but it was highly recommended and I do own it! Don't know for sure if possession was a donation or library book.. It didn't have library binding.. Maybe it was a share ;)

#44 Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. I never would have found out about this if not for LT. Really fun book, and a quick read.

>239 ipsoivan:, that is in my TBR pile!

I hope you enjoy it!

#45 Sentimental Education by Flaubert. This took me a little while to get into, but, oh, it was so worth it in the end!

#46 I Knock at the Door, the first of 6 volumes of autobiography by Irish playwright, Sean O'Casey. One blurb on the back of the book says it is "one of the most uncomfortable and memorable works of the century". I'm not sure about the "of the century" part, but certainly it's uncomfortable and memorable. I'll be reading more when I recover from this one.

#47 How It All Began by Penelope Lively. I needed a break from grim after I Knock at the Door. This was a wonderful change--bittersweet.

#48 Arthur and George. This one grated a bit. The true story of how Arthur Conan Doyle tried to clear the name of a solicitor accused of attacking livestock and sending poison pen letters in the early 20th century. The chapters to do with the early years of both characters were interesting, and the passages about the crimes and Edalji's time in prison were wonderfully done. The setting up of Doyle's motivation for getting involved was psychologically fairly astute, but really dragged on. O-M-G I just wanted it to end. The same with all the bits about his fascination with psychics and communication with the dead.

I can't figure out what Barnes was up to. Is this mostly biography? All the drawn-out irrelevance leads me in that direction--it felt inclusive rather than unified like a good plot should be. If I knew how to give stars this would be about a 2.5 or 3 out of 5.

Bummer.... I've heard good things about Barnes, but haven't yet read anything by him. Sounds.. trying.

I really liked some of his others, so don't give up on him!

Ok, good to know!

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Maggie!

And to you, connie! I look forward to following your reading in the New Year.

#49 Restoration by Rose Tremain. A reread from many years ago, and as wonderful as I remember.

Just added Restoration to my wish list!

I hope you enjoy it!

#50 The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. Bizarre and absorbing. I really liked this one.

>255 avanders: Thank you! You too.

#51 The Mill on the Floss. Wonderfully written, very funny in parts, but... I'm stopping on p. 167. Dare I say I'm bored? I really could care less what happens to these beautifully-drawn characters. I couldn't read this in my first year of university, and find that I really can't now either. I still love Middlemarch, but all of her other books have not been for me.