jen.e.moore has too many ROOTs and not enough time

I'm excited to get back to ROOTing this year, but I've made an unusual decision - I'm trying to read less this year. I have a lot of other projects to work on, including writing a book of my own, which I can't do and read at the same time! So I'm limiting myself to just 5 ROOTs (and 5 library books, plus a couple of re-reads) per month. Which is half what I did last year. (Well, except for November. I didn't read anything in November.)

I bought a ton of books last year, so even though I pulled more than 80 ROOTs from my shelves, I'm starting the year with 300 ROOTs to read. As you can see, I had to move to the top of the bookshelf in addition to the row on the floor. (I read a lot of short ROOTs at the end of the year, which does not help the shelf-space problem at all.)



I'm also borrowing Jackie_K's Jar of Fate system, kind of - I've written out the titles of fifty ROOTs and put them in a jar to pull my next selection from. (I left myself a little room for impulse decisions.) And I tried to pick titles that I've either had for a long time or that I know I will be inclined to put off - mostly long books! And then I decided I might as well do the same for my ever-growing list of library books that I want to check out, so I made a smaller jar (just thirty) for those. (Pictures of that to come!)

Before I can start my Jar of Fate, though, I'm going to finish the ROOTs held over from last year.

Welcome back and good luck with your ROOT reading! Also I hope the writing goes well!

Welcome back and good luck with your writing!

Welcome back & Happy 2017 ROOTing!

Also, good luck w/ writing!

Happy New Year and good luck with your 2017 ROOT challenge, as well as your own book!

Welcome back, and good luck with the ROOTing, I hope the Jar of Fate is a success for you! And best of luck with the writing too - maybe your title will appear on future threads in this group :)

Welcome back and Happy ROOTing, Jen.

Good luck with writing your own book. Very exciting.

And the first ROOT finished of the year is Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower! I actually started reading this as a library book, ran out of time and had to bring it back, and bought a copy. I could tell I'd want it. This is actually a deeply scary book to be reading right now, if you're at all nervous about the future, but it's a hopeful one, too. It's a story about building community out of chaos, starting over again with nothing, and stubbornly sticking to your beliefs in the face of terrible, terrifying change. I'm pretty sure I'll end up re-reading this a lot.

Good luck with your rooting. I love Octavia Bulter. I've read Kindred, but will add the above to my wishlist.

Best of luck with your writing and ROOTing goals.

Good luck with your goals. I am looking forward to seeing what you think about King Solomon's Mines - my mom used to read that one to us when we were kids and we used to laugh so much about the hero's companion and his Beautiful White Legs (I think they originally found him when he was shaving and not wearing trousers, so he wasn't allowed them because the tribesman would think he was angry at them... there were certain colonialist attitudes that are unfortunate, but that was pretty funny).

>9 jen.e.moore: oh man... my first BB of the year!

>13 avanders: :D :D :D

>13 avanders: Not translated into Dutch! pfffff. Dodging the BB!!

Second ROOT of the year is King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard. Well. This has plenty of value as a historical artifact - ancestor of Indiana Jones and all the other pulp adventure fiction like it - but it's so tremendously racist and misogynist that I really can't see the value in reading it for entertainment, not when there are so many things now that are so much better. I finished this largely out of momentum, so the prose is good enough. Also, I now know negative amounts of information about the Zulu, because I have no idea if any of the statements Quartermain makes are even slightly accurate.

I like your eclectic selection of ROOTs and wish you enjoyment in reaching your goal for 2017. Seeing the cover images does make a diary interesting!

>16 jen.e.moore:
It's always a shame when you read books that suffer so much from being "of their time" that it ruins any enjoyment that might be had. Given the above, I suspect my mother's read-aloud was highly edited (the-good-parts-version as The Princess Bride would have it). Hope your next read is much better!

>17 Limelite: I thought cover images would liven things up a little bit. :)

>18 Caramellunacy: I can definitely see having enjoyed this as a kid - for one, a lot of the stereotypes would have gone over my head (they're mostly not foul, just gross overgeneralization and a general attitude of colonialism), and for another, I wouldn't have already read so many things that were so much better. I missed my chance to enjoy this one, is all.

Third ROOT is one I've been working on since November - The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley. I'm generally a pretty even-keeled person, sometimes to a fault. I tend to let things slide a lot longer than I should. When I need to remember what anger is good for, how to direct it appropriately and what to do with it, I read Kameron Hurley. Even when I don't always agree with her, she's passionate about doing right and reducing harm. She's one of the people who taught me how to apologize, and I always go back to her writing when I'm struggling with how to do the right thing and how to act appropriately in diverse spaces. She admits when things are hard, but doesn't let that be an excuse for not doing them, which is the kind of strength I find I need in times like these.

(I have her new science fiction epic, The Stars are Legion, on pre-order -- I can't wait!)

>20 jen.e.moore: Sounds like a great philosophy for anger management! And I think everybody should learn to apologize MORE, myself included.

>20 jen.e.moore: That sounds great, I've added it to my wishlist.

>15 connie53: lol! lucky... ;)

>20 jen.e.moore: and congrats on another ROOT pulled! Sounds interesting & you're making good progress! :)

Number Four, an old acquisition from Early Reviewers, At the Point of a Cutlass by Gregory N. Flemming. I really wanted to like this - I read Ashton's Memorial shortly before this book came out and found it fascinating - but unfortunately this book has a major lack of focus that made it very difficult to get through, even though the main text clocks in at less than 200 pages. Flemming offers a lot of auxiliary stories to shed more light on the main narrative (which makes sense, given how little direct evidence there is about the actions of any one pirate in history), but he tells them all with exactly the same style and emphasis. But he also tells stories of other ships and crews who later come into contact with the main narrative, again in the same style and with the same emphasis - which means it's impossible to tell why any given story is relevant, if you'll have to remember any of this later, or what the actual point of the book is. I found it more confusing than enlightening, and I've read quite a bit on the history of the Golden Age of Piracy; someone picking this up without as much background is likely to be even more confused.

#5, one I've had hanging around for a long time - The Last Ring-bearer by Kiril Yeskov. This is not the kind of thing I usually like - What if the good guys were actually the bad guys? - and on top of that it's just not terribly well-written, although it's hard to tell how much of that is an artifact of translation. (Not all of it, I'm sure, but some of it probably is.) What it is is *fascinating,* though, an application of modern geopolitics to The Lord of the Rings. What happens to the story if you start with the baseline assumption that science and technological advancement are good and enforced cultural stagnation is bad? From there you get Mordor and Umbar as the cosmopolitan and intellectual centers of society, much in the style of the Middle East during Europe's Dark Ages, with Gondor as a corrupt backwater and Rohan the backwater of a backwater. The Orcs are not Orcs but humans of a different ethnic background; the Elves are Elves but even more alien and inhuman. As a book it's not terribly successful, and as a piece of fanfiction it's frankly ridiculous, but as a longform stream-of-consciousness what-if game of worldbuilding, it's addictive. And it's an important piece of modern-myth-making-history, which is why I read it in the first place, and why I kept going after the (frankly offputting) first couple of chapters.

>25 jen.e.moore: interesting ... maybe someone will write a better version someday... I think I would get too frustrated w/ the fact that it wasn't written well, despite the very interesting concept!

>26 avanders: It was definitely weird - I usually don't read a book with so much head-jumping, weird tense issues (although that might have been an artifact of translation), and dialogue that's so anachronistic. So I suppose it gets points for being interesting despite all that!

>27 jen.e.moore: it probably would from me -- if the story keeps me reading despite major writing issues, I'm usually pretty impressed w/ that ;)

#6, first ROOT of February, Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2012 Edition. This is smaller than the later collections, but just as good. My favorites were Dormanna by Gene Wolfe, a sweet, sweet story about a girl's imaginary friend who may be something more; The Ghosts of Christmas by Paul Cornell ,a beautiful time-travel story about the ways we mess up our kids and our parents, and also why time travel is probably not a good idea, and also how easy it is to be a terrible person even when you're trying not to be; and Our Human by Adam-Troy Castro - two aliens, bounty-hunting, find a human monster living among more aliens. Evil and its uses; greatness divorced from morality. Fascinating, and with very good aliens.

ROOT #7 is the first one from my Jar of Fate, Bishop to Queen's Knight by Bartenn Mills. A fun serial killer/procedural with a really great central character and (*gasp*) a het romance I actually like! There are a few odd quirks - character names are sometimes kind of hokey, and I figured out the plot twist about halfway through and spent the rest of the book waiting for Bishop to catch up - but Bishop is a terrific main character. He feels real, he's got history and weight and solidity, and I would like to read an entire series of books about him. (Disclaimer: the author is a friend of mine. But I've read a whole lot of mediocre self-published novels by friends and acquaintances that I'd never review so I wouldn't have to complain about them. This one was really genuinely fun!)

Squeezed in one more last night! #8, The Sharing Knife: Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold. This series is the perfect blend of romance and worldbuilding: a fascinating, very American fantasy world (for all it's got kings and mages in its history), and a sweet, wonderful couple. (This is book two in the series; I'd read book one ages ago, and this has been sitting on my shelf ever since, waiting for me to get around to it. Unfortunately I don't yet have books three and four (ordered copies last night), so those won't count for ROOTs this year, alas.) I love the slow reveal of how the magic and the monsters work, and I'm excited for the rest of the series.

The rest of my books for February were new ones, so that's it for me for a while. Now to get caught up on library books!...

>31 jen.e.moore: I looked this up on Amazon and now I have to read it :). Added to list.

After a bunch of new books, another ROOT at last! #9, Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. A well-written, devastating account of a horrifying chapter in American history. In the 1920s, the Osage tribe was one of the wealthiest groups of people in the country, after oil had been found under their reservation. Careful political wrangling established that each member of the tribe had an equal share - headrights - to the mineral wealth, and that these headrights could not be sold, only inherited. And large numbers of Osage - at least twenty-five, quite probably hundreds - were murdered by white relatives, spouses, or guardians with an eye on all that money. The first two parts of the book follow the central case, the FBI investigation into William Hale, known as the King of the Osage Hills, who was behind a plot to murder several people, funneling their headrights to Mollie Burkhart, the wife of his associate; they were arrested before Mollie could be killed herself. In the final part, though, Grann describes an overall "culture of killing" that pervaded the white population of Osage country at the time. The Osage Reign of Terror was not born out of one conspiracy but from a state of mind in which people were less than people, obstacles keeping wealth from white hands.

Hi Jen, just stopping by to see what you have been reading and say Hi!

>34 connie53: Thanks, Connie! It's been a slow reading month, and it doesn't look like it's getting better any time soon. I'm glad I set myself a low goal this year!

#10, Sheepfarmer's Daughter by Elizabeth Moon. A pretty good example of the 80s/90s fantasy trend for gritty realism in the lives of ordinary soldiers - this is very much a military fantasy, focused on the minutiae of training, fighting, and surviving. Unfortunately, I hate those details. I always skip over them in other books, but that's basically the whole book here. There are some interesting flashes of worldbuilding here and there (though I suspect there's not much more to it than the standard D&D manual), but there's a lot of fighting to go through to get there.

I read this because it'd been recommended to me many times as one of the few examples of an asexual main character in fiction. I was a little leery, because someone had also mentioned a sexual assault, but that's not used as motivation - Paks explains, after she's been assaulted by another soldier, that she didn't want to sleep with him, she didn't want to sleep with anyone, he just wouldn't let it go. She is a pretty great asexual character. I wish I liked the book more.

(This is actually a twofer - I have both the ebook and a hardcover of the whole trilogy, which I'm not going to bother continuing on with. I'm not counting books weeded but not read from my ROOT pile this year, but I am pretty delighted at how much shelf space that frees up...)

Even though I had a short weekend this week, I still managed to finish two books!

#11, North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud is one of the best collections of short stories I've read in a long time. The characters are painfully real, many of them not good people at all, but fascinating, and the stories linger. My favorites were "You Go Where It Takes You," a story about becoming someone else; "Sunbleached," a story about a vampire, and "The Good Husband," a story about suicide and the stories we tell ourselves about what kind of people we are.

#12, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov is known for being the king of unreliable narrators and I still fell for this one. I love metatextual books like S. (touchstone fails) and House of Leaves, so of course when I found out that this was in the same vein it had to become my first Nabokov. An engrossing story told via commentary on the last poem by an aging poet - the ways in which the two have nothing to do with each other is fascinating. The Introduction in the Everyman's Library edition I have is excellent, too, and not only because it warns you ahead of time not to read the Introduction before you've read the book.

#13, Uncanny Magazine Issue Eleven. A solid issue, if containing a slightly higher proportion of stories that I didn't quite connect with than usual.

#14, Mugging the Muse by Holly Lisle. This was supposed to be something I could finish quickly to meet last year's quotas, and then I got sucked into doing all the exercises and it took much longer than expected. There is a lot of advice in here that is exactly like all the other writing advice you've ever heard, but it's well presented and there are some good exercises included along the way. Entirely serviceable, except for the one anti-political-correctness rant that really rubbed me the wrong way and convinced me that her writing classes are not for me. But I've got some good ideas from it, which is the important thing.

15. Convicting Avery by Michael D. Cicchini. I'm not sure that Michael Cicchini knows anything more about the Avery & Dassey cases than was presented in the miniseries, but he's written a damn good book about the legal system behind it. Cicchini is a defense attorney in Wisconsin and an advocate of legal reform in a lot of the same areas that proved so problematic in these cases, and he lays out the flaws and failings of these cases with the careful precision of...well, a lawyer. He knows his stuff, and he explains it well, detailing just how a system that is convinced of its own rightness can enact such outrageous miscarriages of justice. You won't be convinced of anything in particular about Steven Avery or Brendan Dassey (or even Ken Krantz or Len Kachinsky) that you weren't already convinced of by the Netflix series, but you will be better able to make a case for what needs to be changed in our justice system.

>40 jen.e.moore: a fascinating case, and sounds like a very worthwhile book - viewed from Scotland (where we have our own legal system, distinct from the rest of the UK) -some of the procedural stuff in the Avery case was shockingly lacking in safeguards.

But that's not to say we don't still have miscarriages of justice here. Some people will always find a way through a system to enact their prejudices.

Can't catch up, but will start anew here! Happy reading!

16. Ill Will by Dan Chaon. When he was a teenager, Dusty's parents, along with his aunt and uncle, were murdered. He told the cops his adopted brother Rusty did it, that Rusty was a Satanist, that he'd sacrificed them in a horrible ritual. Now he has teenagers of his own, and Rusty has been exonerated and released from prison. Dustin's wife has died of cancer, his sons don't talk to him, and his best friend is a patient of his, Aqil, a former cop who's investigating a serial killer who most everyone believes is an urban myth.

The failures of memory, false convictions, the Satanism scare of the 80s and early 90s, dysfunctional families - this is everything I wanted in a thriller. Except, unfortunately, I just didn't like it all that much. A lot of it is the characters, I think - Dustin is framed as very feminine, which is not a great way to frame an unsympathetic male POV character. There's a lot going on in this book, and it just didn't quite gel for me.

17. Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich, a large collection of short surrealist fiction - not my usual taste, but there are some interesting things in here. My favorites were "Finally Fruit," about a woman who becomes a monster; "Pretending," about a group of atheists who decide to pretend that one of their group is a ghost, and "Whisper," a pretty classic (but exceedingly well-executed) creepypasta-ish story about a guy who tape records himself sleeping to prove he doesn't snore and catches something else.

18. Boy in the Water by Stephen Dobyns. I continue to be impressed at Dobyns's combination of astute psychological realism and 90s thriller movie endings. It's a little disorienting there at the end sometimes, but it makes for an overall compelling read. (I definitely preferred The Church of Dead Girls, though.)

19-21. The second of Ru Emerson's Night-Threads trilogies: The Craft of Light, The Art of the Sword, and The Science of Power. I read the first three books in this trilogy when I was a kid reading through literally everything in my library's Science Fiction & Fantasy section; a few years ago I found The Craft of Light in a used bookstore and was boggled to discover there were more! So over the past few weeks I've been re-reading the first three and reading these. Alas, it's not as good as I remembered, and the three later books aren't even as good as the first three. It's all very 90s, not just the dated fashion and music references but also the Drugs Are Bad plot in the later three books, and although this world is supposed to be an alternate history version of our own (in Southern California no less!) it takes us until Book 5 of a six book series to meet someone who is unambiguously Not White. I still love the magic system, and I still love Lialla, but overall I wouldn't recommend this series to anyone who doesn't already have nostalgia over it.

22. Uncanny Magazine Issue 13, read out of order because I wanted to read "Seasons of Glass and Iron" before WisCon this year, and then didn't get around to finishing the issue for a good long while.

Don't You Worry, You Aliens by Paul Cornell - just a little cozy apocalypse, a man alone in an abandoned village. Weirdly comforting.

Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies by Brooke Bolander - do not fuck with Harpies. A revenge story, a reclaiming story. Fabulous. I want to read the twelve-book noir series about her and her sisters.

Kamanti's Child by Jennifer Marie Brissett - a pregnant alien woman, a refugee from the destruction of her village, meets a human girl. A little too short and unresolved for my taste; it feels like the beginning of something much bigger.

White Hart, Black Knight by Alex Bledsoe - this particular combination of modern colloquialism and Mallory-style medieval (attempts at) heroics just doesn't work for me, for some reason.

The Green Knight's Wife by Kat Howard - ...just what it says on the tin, and absolutely perfect.

Can't Beat 'Em by Nalo Hopkinson - queer lady plumbers versus the metaphysical drain monsters. I. I can't describe it better than that, but that should be enough to entice *anyone.*

Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar - I didn't know you could turn intersectional feminism into a fairy tale? But it turns out you can, if you're Amal El-Mohtar, and it's beautiful and heartbreaking and I just want Tabitha and Amira to be happy forever. No wonder this is winning all the awards.

And essays: on identifying with fictional villains by Alyssa Wong; a personal narrative of a woman in games, in geekdom, in supposedly male spaces, by Monica Valentinelli; on the power of fairy tales by Navah Wolfe, editor of The Starlit Wood; on the ways that attempting to recreate the success of The Avengers spells failure for the DC movieverse (plus a tremendous critique of the way the Avengers sequels fail), by Tansy Rayner Roberts; on losing parts of your identity due to and struggling for accommodations for a chronic illness by Keidra Chaney, creator of The Learned Fangirl; on fighting inequality by Hao Jingfang.

And poems: The Long Run, by Neil Gaiman, which honestly just reminded me of all the things that annoy me about Neil Gaiman right now; Rose Child, by Theodora Goss, a gardener slowly comes to see the small fairy civilization living in their garden; Blue Flowers: Fragments, by Sofia Samatar, a beautiful little collection of scenes.

Plus interviews with Jennifer Marie Brissett and Alex Bledsoe.

>46 jen.e.moore: It is often disappointing to read child hood favorites when grown up. I only tried that once and had the same experience as you did

>48 connie53: Jo Walton calls it the Suck Fairy, as in "Oh, this was good when I read it last, the Suck Fairy must have visited and made it suck now." :) On the plus side, the Suck Fairy helps me not have to cart around so many books every time I move...

>49 jen.e.moore: Yes, I know. We call it the Suck Fairy on my book-club too. I think we stole that expression from Mrs. Walton.

23. Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough - In the summer and fall of 1888, Doctor Thomas Bond is assisting the police with their investigations into two murderers running loose in London - Jack the Ripper and, more chillingly, a killer whose victims turn up in pieces and missing their heads. Something not entirely human seems to be behind the epidemic of violence, and the answers are closer than anyone is comfortable with. I loved this horror-thriller based around the true story of a lesser-known Victorian serial killer (although Jack still features prominently in the background), and I was pleasantly surprised by Dr. Bond's characterization. He self-medicates for his anxiety with opium and laudanum, he convinces himself that the supernatural is real and fake and real again, but he holds firm to his moral compass all the way through. Thoroughly enjoyable, and I'm excited to read the sequel.

(Yes, I've had this ARC since 2013. Oops.)

>51 jen.e.moore: sounds good, and a sequel too - onto the wishlist it goes!

>52 floremolla: I'm reading the sequel right now and it's also great! Pinborough really broke out this year with Behind Her Eyes, I'm so glad to see she's got a good backlist too.

And I squeezed in one more tonight:

24. Uncanny Magazine Issue Twelve - My Body, Herself by Carmen Maria Machado - a moving, atmospheric story about a woman who dies in a cave and the self that climbs out of the cave again years later.

Not a Miracle but a Marvel by Tim Pratt - a delightful, fun story about a poly quad vacation that's crashed by fairyland; they crash fairyland back. Adorable.

Under One Roof by Sarah Pinker - a ghost story, deliciously creepy, about stagnation, things left behind, and learning new things about people you love.

The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight by E. Lily Yu - a fairytale about a young, inexperienced witch and a manipulative knight; about wounded people and doing right by yourself.

Rooms Formed of Neurons and Sex - a filthy, sexy romance, breakup, and aftermath between a phone sex worker and a brain in a jar.

Ogres of East Africa by Sofia Samatar - a chronicle of monsters, and the commentary in the margins about the relationship between the two Africans collecting it on behalf of the white hunter who's looking for newer prey.

Essays: "This is Our Work" by Mary Anne Mohanraj, on Star Trek providing a goal to strive for; "All True, Especially the Lies" by Una McCormack, on being a B5 fan becoming a DS9 fan; "Blood Matters" by Aidan Moher, on the relationships between parents and children; "Growing Up in Wonderland" by Dominick Parisien, on having hallucinations and the power of narrative

Poems: (Meat Bone Tea) by S. Qiouyi Lu, dreamy and atmospheric; Million-Year Elegies by Ada Hoffmann, a child's dream of dinosaurs; and The Ghost Marriage by Sonja Taaffe, a distillation of the feeling of nostalgia for something that never existed.

And interviews with Carmen Maria Machado & Sarah Pinsker.

(Only four more to go and I'll be caught up! We'll see if I can manage it before the next issue comes out...)

25. And another one to start August! Uncanny Magazine Issue Fourteen - Bodies Stacked Like Firewood by Sam J. Miller - friends of a visionary young trans man who's committed suicide hold a wake. Themes of time travel, grief and guilt, and human potential. This story hit me where it hurts in the best possible way.

Monster Girls Don't Cry by A. Merc Rustad - absolutely everything I love in a monster girl story, vicious and biting.

Goddess, Worm by Cassandra Khaw - a story about the silkworm-goddess, who was deified and boiled alive to give silk to the world, who chooses to be the goddess of people who have no one else to look out for them. Outstanding.

The Thule Stowaway by Maria Dahvana Headley - Edgar Allen Poe, his women (real and fictional), his stories (real and fictional), and the secret history behind his famous portrait. Constructed with that Gothic layering I love so much, and a wonderful recentering of women in classic horror.

To Budapest With Love by Theodora Goss - a story-essay on being an alien, in Hungary and America

Some Cupids Kill With Arrows by Tansy Rayner Roberts - a totally adorable modern deity romance

The Unknown God by Ann Leckie - a god becomes human, makes a mistake, goes looking for a higher power to obtain forgiveness; has to atone for his mistake the hard way, like the rest of us.

Essays: Inferior Beasts by Mark Oshiro, on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and how it failed at empathy at a critical moment; Why You Should Read Romance by Natalie Luhrs, not an outstanding essay (not bad, just not all that different from many I've seen on the topic) but with some good recs; I Have Never Not Been an Object by Deliah S. Dawson, on why she writes rape, violence, and broken people; Blood of the Revolution by Angel Cruz, on the meaning of Filipinas telling stories and writing about the aswang and the manananggal

Poems: In Lieu of the Stories My Santera Abuela Should Have Told Me Herself, This Poem by Carols Hernandez, second-hand grandmother stories; Jean-Luc, Future Ghost by Nin Harris, on children not born; Except Thou Bless Me by Nicasio Andres Reed, a poem about desire that didn't really work for me, but then, poems about desire rarely do.

And interviews with A. Merc Rustad and Maria Dahvana Headley.

26. Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? by Katrine Marçal - Economic theory is based around the idea of Economic Man - a perfectly rational individual whose only relationships with other people are in trade or in competition (all traditionally masculine traits, of course). Of course, humans aren't like this, but over time Economic Man has gone from a simplification for the purposes of theorizing to an ideal that we strive to emulate in all things. This isn't just wrong, it's damaging. It leaves out fundamental, necessary parts of the human experience, like bodies, like dependency, like love. It breaks people and economies and societies, and because we don't understand what we're doing, we just keep doing it over and over again.

The GDP doesn't include unpaid women's labor - childcare, housekeeping, cooking for the family. Feminism's economic progress has been calculated in terms of how many women take paid jobs, but has ignored the fact that this means that their unpaid labor still needs doing, and that this represents a massive shift in the way our economy functions (or, too often, doesn't).

The prose in this book is written in crisp, short sentences in short paragraphs, which, combined with the subject matter, gives the impression of a cold, sarcastic rage. Marçal is engaged in the process of tearing down one of the pillars of society, and she's doing it with a vengeance. I wish I had faith that she would succeed.

>55 jen.e.moore: This sounds interesting. And my library has it!

>55 jen.e.moore: That's a BB for me!

Great review and a BB for me, who rarely reads non-fiction! :)

>55 jen.e.moore: I will have to pick that up. In my history class I use an excerpt from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations when I teach about capitalism, GDP and GNP.

Wow, I didn't expect that that would be the book everyone was interested in! It was great, though, I hope you all enjoy it.

>60 jen.e.moore: I am four chapters in, and "enjoy" is not quite the word. She's trying too hard. I'm reading the German translation and I keep wondering at the colloquialisms (there are phrases that would correspond to something like "plain as a pikestaff"). Are these present in the English version, too?

I read quite a few books on my vacation, but they were mostly new books (and I went to Powell's in Portland, so now of course I have even more. Alas.)

27. Skull Wars by David Hurst Thomas - An excellent overview of the history of the archaeology and anthropology of American Indians, inspired by the controversy over Kennewick Man. This is an embarrassing and shameful history for white scientists, but it's one that needs to be told, and this is a creditable effort, for all that it's seventeen years old now.

Glad to hear you got lots of reading done on vacation! Sometimes it's harder to read on vacation than in regular life, at least for me, because there's always so much to do!

Enjoy your Powell's haul!

Still on that late summer true-crime kick I always seem to get. (Until it turns to fall and becomes a horror kick.)

28. Who Killed These Girls? by Beverly Lowry - A solid, thorough book about the Yogurt Shop Murders in Austin, Texas that has some aspirations to be something bigger than that but doesn't quite make it. In 1991, four teenage girls - two employees closing the store and the younger sister and friend of one of the employees - were murdered in an I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! store in Austin, Texas, and the store set on fire. It was 1999 before any arrests were made: police zeroed in on a group of four young men, teenage boys at the time of the crime, who they believed were guilty. Of the four, three were indicted, two were tried and found guilty, and both of those convictions have been thrown out. DNA evidence later available doesn't match any of the accused, but police continue to insist that they had the right guys and that the indictments still stand - although it's been sixteen years since the original trials. The story of the Austin Yogurt Shop Murders is another frustrating entry in the ever-growing catalog of police incompetence (and over-focus) rendering tragedies unsolvable. (Content note: this book contains some fairly graphic descriptions of what happened to the girls, including sexual assault, gunshot wounds, and postmortem fire damage.)

29. The House of Lost Souls by F.G. Cottam - A perfectly decent "legacy of the evil sorcerer" horror novel that unfortunately doesn't manage to rise to anything greater. The bits set in the 1920s are really pretty good, but unfortunately the plot rests on the shoulders of the modern characters, and there are a few too many convenient reveals too late in the story for it to work for me. (Which is too bad - the side characters are terrific. It's just the main ones who are a little tedious.)

30. Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre - This is a *weird* book - mostly historical fiction about Venetia, Lady Digby, wife of Sir Kenelm Digby, an alchemist of the court of King Charles I. But it reaches the level of experimental fiction (I can't quite say historical fantasy) in the way it takes Kenelm's alchemy seriously and rewards him with visions of the future, flashes of insight from modern times, scattered anachronisms throughout the text. And yet it never quite becomes one of those books where you feel like you know less about history because of the anachronisms: the narrator's voice is strong enough for that, at least. This is definitely not a book for everyone, but I found I enjoyed it quite a lot.

After being eaten by a grue for most of the past couple of months, I have finally finished another ROOT...kind of. I abandoned Angelfall by Susan Ee less than halfway through; I'm just not feeling the present-tense YA drama at all. I'm counting it as ROOT #31.

Welcome back! Abandoning a book totally counts as a ROOT. I hope the next one is better!

I count abandoned books too - at least I gave it a go! Seconding rp's wish for a better one next!

I'm enjoying a lot of books - none of them ROOTs, unfortunately! I'll get back to them sooner or later...

One last ROOT for the year -

32. Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb - Oh man, why didn't anyone tell me this book was so good? (That's a lie, many people told me this book was excellent, I just didn't immediately drop everything and read it like I should have.) Yes, it's got the somewhat plodding pace characteristic of 90s epic fantasy novels, the kind of thing that lets you get so immersed in the world you don't realize you're neck-deep in it until you accidentally capitalize the wrong word in the ordinary world. Yes, it's very sparse on female characters, and yes, wow, Fitz's life is unreasonably hard. But it takes the classic fantasy POV character - the royal bastard - and gives him a really interesting, morally dubious and complex job, and turns him loose to develop his own set of ethics. I don't think this is the kind of thing that could be done at shorter lengths, really. I'm excited to get to the rest of the series.

>71 jen.e.moore: I could have told you that too! LOL.

>71 jen.e.moore: You know, I think people have been telling me that was good, too, and I haven't listened. Time to add it to the wishlist, I think.

>71 jen.e.moore: I decided to venture into the world of fantasy in 2018 - this could be the one!

>74 floremolla: Ohh, Nice, Donna. I hope you enjoy Fantasy. It's my number one love in genres.

>73 bragan:, >74 floremolla:: I don't think you'll be disappointed. Enjoy!

I was wrong, I squeezed in one more ROOT today!

33. Blood Work by Holly Tucker - This is a very confused book. Is it a murder story, like the subtitle seems to suggest? Is it about the discovery and abandonment of technology, out of step with our normal understanding of scientific history, like the first few chapters harp on about? The epilogue explains that it's actually about the way moral concerns influence the development of important and life-saving science, which would have been nice to know earlier. The story of Denis and his sabotaged transfusion experiments is interesting, but I'm not sure there's a whole book in it, or at least not this book.