Charon07’s ROOT

Hello, ROOTers! I’m new to LibraryThing, and new to the ROOT challenge. I hope it’s OK that I’m joining so late. This seems like a great way to both dig into books that have been languishing on my shelves and also keep me from adding to the pile! I’m hoping to read a book every two weeks, so since I’m late to the game, my goal is 11 books in 2021. Anything I already own as of this date (July 21, 2021) is fair game.

Welcome!

Perfectly fine to join now! Wishing you all success!
Enjoy your reading!

Welcome to LT and the ROOTers, ad good luck with your goal!

Welcome to the group! I've found it so helpful for getting my books read (I've also found it helpful for suggestions of more books to buy, but we'll gloss over that...!).

Well, I finished my first ROOT, though it’s a bit of a cheat since I’d started it before joining the group. But I’m going to count it anyway:

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson 🔊 (audio book)

Welcome to the ROOTers, Charon07

Perfectly okay to count that book as your first ROOT.

Welcome aboard! Glad to see you're off to a good start :)

I’ve snuck in another “cheat,” one that I was almost done with when I joined. I’m satisfied that two cheats will count for one real ROOT this month:

The Game by A.S. Byatt

Possession is one of my all-time favorite novels. The Game is nowhere near that level. It’s so overwhelmingly dry and intellectual, it was very slow going up until the last few chapters. Then the blood and air flowed into it, and the last few chapters were downright moving.

>9 Charon07: I enjoyed Possession and actually really enjoyed the movie version as well (particularly the Victorian story with Jennifer Ehle and Jeremy Northam as LaMotte and Ash) - have you seen it?

>10 Caramellunacy: I did see it, with my husband, who hasn’t read the book. He liked it enormously. I enjoyed it, but I think I would have liked it more if I’d seen it before I’d read the book. There was just so much that had to be left out of the movie, including all the poetry.

My third root, the first of August:

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

I feel as though I’m not clever enough for this book. This was a tree book, but I read it with my iPad at hand in order to Google various references, sometimes to see if they were real or fake. I’m sure I missed a lot of what’s hidden in this book. Nevertheless, it was thought-provoking, and I gave it 4 stars.

Found your thread and dropping off a star!

>13 curioussquared: Thanks for stopping by!

I finished another book in August, but not a ROOT:

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green 🔊

This is a series of essays from John Green’s (of vlog brothers/Nerdfighteria fame) blog of the same name. I can’t recommend this highly enough. I snuck this in this month even though it wasn’t a ROOT because I needed something like this, something to inspire optimism even in the midst of dark times. I give John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed 5 stars. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

>15 Charon07: I need to pick up a copy of that one soon! I'm someone who's been reading John Green since his very first book came out. I never watched every vlogbrothers video, but have been aware of them since close to when they started, too. There's a hilarious phenomenon happening on TikTok right now -- Hank has a huuuge following on that platform and a lot of Gen Z'ers on the app know him as the science video guy. At least once per video somebody in the comments figures out John Green is Hank's brother. I think it's the first time Hank has been more well-known in a space and it's super funny to see the reversal!

>16 curioussquared: I’ve only recently started watching the vlogbrothers on YouTube, after first becoming a fan of Hank’s SciShow videos. Anthropocene Reviewed is the first John Green book I’ve read. I’ve been aware of his novels, but a little ambivalent about reading them, since whenever I read YA or YA-adjacent novels these days, I’m always disappointed.

I finished my second ROOT of August, Things in Jars by Jess Kidd. It was entertaining, if somewhat darker than I expected, and I learned about the merrow, a sort of Irish mermaid, but scarier. Though it was rather uneven overall, there were some interesting characters that I might be willing to read about again in a sequel, which seems possible.

I squeaked in a third ROOT in August, Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller. This was a delightful exploration of taxonomy, a brief biography of David Starr Jordan (ichthyologist, first president of Stanford University, and eugenicist), and a memoir that framed and gave person meaning to it all.

>16 curioussquared: I do too.

My first ROOT of September: The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter 🔊. This collection of reinterpreted fairy tales was mostly dark and sensuous: blood, sex, animals, and self-determining women. I enjoyed it!

I'm just catching up on some threads while I'm on LT.

>18 Charon07: Things in Jars has been getting some good press on LT. It's a bit hard to get hold of though; I have it on hold on Overdrive but I'm number 2 on 0 copies on the list.

>9 Charon07: I think you can count them as 2, since you finished them after you started counting :0) I'm all for finding ways of increasing my numbers.

>22 humouress: I think I was having a similarly hard time borrowing it, so I bought the audio book from libro.fm. I have a monthly subscription, which is the source of many ROOTs!

And I did count both of my “cheats,” though I may repent if I actually meet my goal by honest means.

My second root of September: The Nix by Nathan Hill 🔊. This was quite a surprise, and a very pleasant surprise at that, largely because I’d forgotten everything I knew about it in the years since it became a ROOT. Essentially, it’s a novel about the often bad choices we make in life and, ultimately, how we can learn to make different choices.

My first book in October isn’t a ROOT:

The Corpse Flower by Anne Mette Hancock 💻

I got this ebook in the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, so I felt obligated to give it priority. As it turns out, it was quite the page turner—a very suspenseful mystery/thriller, so it was easy to finish quickly.

Only 4 more to go, Charon.

>24 Charon07: I found a used copy of this one at a library book sale earlier this year. Hoping to get to it relatively soon, but then I say that about all my ROOTs :D

>26 connie53: I think I’ll have no trouble making my goal. I’m technically ahead on my progress, if you take into consideration that I started late—I was aiming for 2 books a month.

>27 curioussquared: I think I’d have been daunted by its size if I hadn’t listened to the audiobook, and it would still be sitting on my shelf.

My first ROOT of October, and eighth overall:

The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt 🔊

This was such a rich and complicated novel that I need to take some time to write a decent review. The title comes from a like-named book by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who was a 17th-century philosopher and writer, and an icon to the protagonist Harriet “Harry” Burden, a modern-day artist who is similarly disregarded by her contemporaries because she is a woman. There is a lot of food for thought about sex and gender, mysogyny, how art is perceived, and identity itself.

My second ROOT of October, and ninth overall:

Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford 🔊

An eerie, unsettling fantasy about a human-like but not-human father and daughter who heal the people they call Cures in a most unsettling way. I found Ada to be an interesting character, and I particularly enjoyed how we are introduced to their world—without explanation, without fanfare, without obvious “world building,” just Ada describing the events in her life. It did move rather slowly, so not the most compelling read, but certainly worth the time for its weirdness and novelty.

I managed a third ROOT for October:

The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg 🔊

I can’t say I found it satisfying or worthwhile. The protagonist’s behavior, motivations, reactions were all erratic and inexplicable to me, so this novel about her grief and loss was lost on me.

I finished my first ROOT of November and my 11th overall, which means I’ve reached my target for the year!

Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis 🔊

This was an excellent and unique retelling of the Cupid and Psyche, except for the overly Christian ending, which was a little too much proselytizing for my taste.

>33 Charon07: Do you have any Lewis you recommend that doesn't feel super proselytiz-y? Even Narnia was too much for me, but I know lots of people love his other work.

>33 Charon07: Congrats on reaching your goal!

>34 curioussquared: I think this might be the only other C.S. Lewis I’ve read besides the Narnia books (and I can’t recall if I’ve read them all), and to me they’re all about the same in terms of level of Christian allegory. But in the Narnia books, I could sort of disregard the proselytizing and enjoy the stories as fantasy, but in Till We Have Faces, humanity’s relationship with the divine is rather the whole point, so there’s not as much “surface” story to appreciate. But it’s told from the perspective of Psyche’s sister, who is a very interesting character with an interesting story and interesting character development, even if she ends up where one might expect, given that it’s C.S. Lewis.

>35 rabbitprincess: Thank you! I think I’ll have to be a little more ambitious next year!

Second ROOT of November, and 12th for the year:

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay 🔊

A psychological drama disguised as a horror story, which I was disappointed by.

Congratulations on reaching your goal!

>39 humouress: Thanks! I’ve been busy with library books, but I hope to get another ROOT or two in before the end of the year.

Third root of November, and 13th overall:

The Fortune Teller by Gwendolyn Womack 🔊

This probably hit my radar because it promised ancient manuscripts and the Tarot, but it was a waste of time—a trite and silly romance that never resorted to originality when it could instead use a cliché.

Good job, Charon. Congrats!