Henrik Madsen's ROOTs are piling up

2023 was a bit disappointing, rooting-wise. I managed just 39, and I bought a looooot of books, so I definitely have to pick up steam this year.

My goal in 2024 will once again be 50 ROOTs. As I have done in previous years I will count everything owned as ROOTs. The really tough ones (acquired before 2014) will be labelled DROOTs (Deep roots).

This year my goal will be 50 books. Happy ROOTing everyone!



ROOTs
1. Anne Weber: Annette, ein Heldinnenepos
2. Chris Claremont og John Byrne: X-Men: Fra asken i ilden
3. Caroline Albertine Minor: Hummerens skjold
4. Chris Claremont og John Byrne: X-Men: Fortiden af i går
5. Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kitteridge
6. Asta Olivia Nordenhof: Djævlebogen
7. Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved
8. Eilis Dillon: The Bitter Glass

DROOTs
1. Peer Hultberg: Byen og verden

Non-ROOTs
Ryu Murakami: I misosuppen
Fatma Aydemir: Ånder (Dschinns)
Wolfgang Koeppen: Der Tod in Rom
Walter Scott: Quentin Durward
Victor Pelevin: The Life of Insects
Nikolaj Leskov: Den fortryllede vandringsmand
Sara Stridsberg: Hunter i Huskvarna

My main goal this year is of course 50 ROOTs but I also have a secondary goal. Not reading the books I buy myself is one thing, but not having read the ones people have given me as gifts is embarrassing.

Last year I managed to read five of those - and I made enough recepies from the cook book on the list to strike that one. Unfortunately, at least from this perspective, I also got seven new ones....

So, this year I will continue focusing on finally getting through all those nice gifts:

Pre-2014
Michel de Montaigne: Essays
Henning Grelle: Thorvald Stauning
Karl Popper: Det åbne samfund og dets fjender
Søren Mørch: Store forandringer
Pia Friis Laneth: Lillys Danmarkshistorie

2018
Gunnar Svendsen mfl.: Vækst og vilkår på landet
Niels Boje Groth: Stationsbyer i dag
Søren Marquardt Frederiksen: Pestlægen
Bo Tao Michaelis og Bente Scavenius: Danmarksbilleder

2019
Tove Ditlevsen: Små hverdagsproblemer
Andrea Wulff: Opfindelsen af naturen
Thomas Mann: Et upolitisk menneskes betragtninger

2020
William Shakespeare: Samlede skuespil i ny oversættelse bind III

2021
Morten Pape: Guds bedste børn
Anne-Lise Marstrand Jørgensen: Margrethe I
Colson Whitehead: Drengene fra Nickel
Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kitteridge
Jesper Clemmensen: Skibet fra helvede

2022
J.D. Salinger: Griberen i rugen
Jeanette Varberg: Vikinger
Thorkild Bjørnvig: Pagten
Nadezja Mandelstam: Med håb mod håb
Mark Millar: Kick-Ass
Aline og Robert Crumb: Tegn på kærlighed

2023
Maren Uthaug: 11%
Charles Dickes: A Tale of Two Cities
Anne Brontë: Agnes Grey
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
William Shakespeare: Samlede skuespil i ny oversættelse bind 4
Niels Brunse: Hvorfor Shakespeare?
Alex Shulman: Brænd alle mine breve

2024
Giuliano da Empoli: Troldmanden fra Kreml
Anne-Marie Mai: Litteraturland - en GPS
Greg Pak: Planet Hulk - Bog 1
Asta Olivia Nordenhof: Djævlebogen

Welcome back, Henrik! Great idea to focus on gift books. I have a book from Christmas 2012 that I haven't read yet...yikes!

Hi Henrik. Good to see you again with the ROOTers. Go get them!

Welcome back!

Welcome back. I'm embarrassed by the number of gift books I've still not read too (so embarrassed that I haven't dared count them!).

Good luck with reading those gift books. I've been pretty good at reading mine in recent years, but know I also have some that have been hanging around an inexplicably long time.

ETA: Now I've checked, not so inexplicably for some of them - big, fat history books, given to me back at a time of life when I had more free time and concentration, but apparently still not enough to tackle them straight away!

Good luck with those gift books, Henrik. Some of them are on my TBR, too, so I'll be looking out for your comments.

Thanks all. I'm looking forward to a better reading year - and hopefully also a year with a bit more activity on the boards.

>7 Rebeki: I know the feeling about some gift books being hard to handle. Most of my really old ones are chunksters as well.

1. Anne Weber: Annette, ein Heldinnenepos

Acquired: I read an article about the book after it received the German Bookprize in 2020 and bought a copy a couple of years later at a trip to Braunlage in Harz

Anne Beaumanoir was a French woman born in Bretagne in 1923. During occupation she joined the communist resistance, left it when it betrayed her ideals only to get caught up in another conflict as she helped FLN during the Algerian war of independence. Her motifs were largely the same, fighting for freedom from foreign oppressors. Most French obviously saw things differently.

Anne is an interesting person, and I enjoyed reading about her life. I also enjoyed how the book was told as an "epos" of ancient times, that is it is written in verse though the text can also be read as prose.

Anyway, good to finally get a ROOT done

4 stars

Last thursday was my birthday - and naturally I had some books on my wishlist. Three wonderful new books revealed themselves from the wrapping paper, which was great but also added three more books to list of gift-books to be read.

Oh well, it's back to the drawing board, or, more accurately, back to the my reading corner on the sofa.

Congrats, Henrik.

I had to smile at what you said about books as presents. If you don't want more books on the TBR, you better not put them on your wish list. ;-))

>12 connie53: Thanks Connie

And you are right of course, I really don't "need" any, but I just like new books so much!

Happy belated birthday, Henrik. Enjoy your new books! There are no better presents, aren't there?

>14 MissWatson: Often it's all I really want, but I feel like I have to make up some other wishes as well.

(BTW I also got tickets for the Caspar David Friedrich exposition in Hamburg, which I'm really looking forward to. So I do enjoy other gifts as well.)

>15 Henrik_Madsen: Oh, wow! I want to go there, too, just haven't gotten round to organising tickets yet. I really need to get my skates on for this.

2. Chris Claremont og John Byrne: X-Men: Fra asken i ilden

Acquired: Chris Claremont visited the Copenhagen bookfair in the fall, and it was a huge experience hearing him talk about his work on the X-Men. And of course I bought some of his books.

This book contains X-Men #129-137 which is generally known as the Dark Phoenix Saga. Jean Grey is Phoenix, a young woman who has the power of a god but is unable to handle all that power. She is pushed over the edge by evil men, and in the end she has to make a radical choice to end the story as a human being.

Obviously you have to like comics and the super hero genre to really appreciate the book, but if you do the storybuilding by Claremont and the art work by Byrne is pretty much the best you can get. I read for the first time in the late 1980s and it hasn't lost a bit of its power.

5 stars

>11 Henrik_Madsen: Happy belated birthday Henrik!

>18 Jackie_K: Thanks, Jackie.

Happy belated birthday! Enjoy your new gift books!

>20 rabbitprincess: Thanks! I got another this weekend when I finally had time to celebrate my birthday with my mother and sister.

3. Caroline Albertine Minor: Hummerens skjold

Acquired: I'm still making my way through books acquired through my book club even though it closed down more than a year ago. This one I got in 2020.

The novel focuses on the three sieblings Ea, Sidsel and Niels. They have lost their parents when they were young - Niels was still a kid - and they are haunted by it. Now they are grown up, but they are still plagued by it, and during a few days they have to face their current lives. Intertwined with the main story is the clairvoyant Belle and her daughter, another broken family.

Minor is a very talented author. The writing is good and especially her female characters are great, but this novel is not a coherent whole. There are too many detours and the characters doesn't really interact.

3 stars

4. Chris Claremont og John Byrne: X-Men: Fremtiden af i går

Acquired: After reading the Phoenix Saga I absolutely had to read this volume as well, so I bought it the local bookshop in February.

The volume contains six issues and an annual from the original X-Men series. They were published 1980-81 and the story picks up right after the end of the Phoenix saga. The best story - and the one for which the volume is named - tells the parallel story of a dystopian future, where robots (the Sentinels) have taken over control of North America to protect humans from the mutant threat, and the present where the X-Men fight to stop the events which will eventually lead to the disaster.

That story is a brilliant piece of science fiction, and the rest of the book is pretty good as well.

4 stars

5. Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kitteridge

Acquired: I always hope to get books for my birthday, and I usually do, but in February 2021 during the second lockdown, I hardly got anything else. It suited me just fine, and this novel was one of them.

Olive Kitteridge and her husband Henry live in a small town in Maine. They are going into retirement and as they try to figure out their new place in life, we learn about them, their family, their friends and some passions that were never realized. Olive is a complicated character: she always speaks her mind, and she doesn't much care, what other people think about her. She is hardly always right, but things always matter to her, and she has a profound influence on many people in the small community where she used to teach at the local school.

The book is a well-written novel about growing old and it is also a nice portrait of a small town where many characters are allowed to have their day in the sun - or at least their own chapter. Olive is usually there in all of them, but sometimes just a little at the edge of the picture. Its reputation is well deserved.

4 stars

6. Asta Olivia Nordenhof: Djævlebogen (The Devil's Book)

Acquired: Another birthday gift - this one form just a month ago.

This is the second novel in Nordenhof's series about the Scandinavian Star catastrophy in the early 1990s. The author wanted to write about the business man behind the shipping company, but she found out, she couldn't do it. Instead she writes a story about an author who once had a troubling experiens as a sex worker and now stays with a man in London during lockdown. There are also some parts on verse, which didn't really stick with me.

Nordenhof writes a brilliant prose and has a great understanding of people on the fringe of society, but I'm much less impressed with her political analysis, and this book wasn't very coherent.

3½ stars

7. Primo Levi: De druknede og de frelste

Acquired: I bought a volume with Levi's three books on Auschwitz last year - this is the last part.

This book is Levi's final reflection on his experience in Auschwitz. It is not just about his own experience but also an attempt to understand the whole system surrounding Auschwitz and the holocaust. As such it is an extremely interesting book, because Levi is able to fuse his own firsthand experience with materiale from other sources and his analytical skills. Furthermore his writing is both lucid and deeply personal.

The Drowned and the Saved is a brilliant but also deeply troubling book. Levi has looked into the abyss that is the human soul in extreme conditions, and it is not a pretty sight.

4½ stars

>26 Henrik_Madsen: I can imagine that must be an overwhelming book to read, Henrik.

>27 connie53: It is, but it also very interesting, because he tries to analyze what happens more than "just" telling about the atrocities he saw.

8. Peer Hultberg: Byen og verden

Acquired: I bought this at a library sale, when I lived in Odense. Probably twenty years ago.

Byen og verden is a portrait of a Danish provinsial town in the 20th century. It is written in 100 separate texts, and each text focus on an individual or a family - but many characters are mentioned several times as the book details the interconnections, the affairs and the feuds among the upper middle class of judges, officers, teachers and priests.

I enjoyed the book at first, but in the end I lost interest in the constant flow of new characters and the peculiar writing style.

3½ stars

9. Eilis Dillon: The Bitter Glass

Acquired: It was the group read with the 1001-group in march. I couldn't get hold of a copy from the library, so I bought it online.

Four sieblings, a friend, a fiancee, a nurse and two babies travel to the countryside outside Galway during the Irish Civil War. They try to get away, but they are cut off when a bridge i bombarde. Shortly after the babies become sick, a column of soldiers settles down at the the estate and thing start going downhill.

It is an interesting book about Irish history and what happens to a group of young people under pressure. I enjoyed reading the novel, but it is not particularly memorable.

3 stars

Hi Henrik, >28 Henrik_Madsen:. Thanks for the further info.