Karen_O ROOTing again.

Another year, another thread. This year I'm more determined than ever to STOP buying new hardcover books. It's ridiculous how many of those I have sitting around, unread, when the paperbacks have now long been available. In fact, I really should be a little smarter about finances all the way around this year and reading off my own shelves is a perfect place to start.

Last year's goal of 45 was barely met in mid-December so I think I'll keep it at 45 again this year with the hope that I actually do much better.

I'm trying to settle on an approach. I have 608 books in my catalog tagged TBR but only 601 in the To Read collection. Can't figure out how to determine which are the disconnected 7 so I'm not going to worry about that at the moment. Of those 339 are fiction of the dead tree variety, 97 are non-fiction and 165 are Kindle books. (Had no idea I had that many Kindle titles!)

Where to begin, where to begin. I've noticed a number of people planning it out and I'm not sure if that would work for me. I've often thought of just starting at the beginning (the fiction volumes are in alpha order by author) and reading until I'm done. Somehow that idea scares me!

So, I'm thinking of reading them in reverse order of when I acquired them -- except that I want to start with an LTER book from a few months ago (Yikes!) that I just haven't gotten to yet.

Currently reading: The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
Soon to be followed by: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (an overdue LTER volume)
Book Group (f2f) read for the month: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
And if there's time, in with all the library books sitting around, I'll add in Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie which I started before vacation in November and haven't looked at since.

Regardless of what library goodies might come my way, or other group reads I'm going to borrow rather than buy, I need to read at least 4 ROOTs per month to make my goal.

Good luck with your rooting!

Welcome back and good luck!

>1 karen_o: ha! I know the pain... So many hardcovers.. That I often don't read until the paperback comes out!!

>2 karen_o: yeah it's fun for me to plan bc I get to re-think about the books on my shelves and why I put 'em there.... But the plans don't stick ;). Good luck working out a method for your 2015 root year!

Welcome back and happy reading!

Karen, read your ROOTs in whatever order you want. I'm sure you'll find some gems there!

>2 karen_o: Karen, I know what you mean. I planned 24 ROOTs leaving space for newly bought books, but I want to make it a bit harder so I decided on an ABC - So at least 26 will be read! And now I'm very excited about reading the Chaos trilogy by Patrick Ness and this will be 3 N's. Not a good thing for the ABC. But very good for the TBR-pile!

Well, my plan went straight out the window and I read more library books than ROOT volumes this month, so I end it thusly:

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud (which I liked very much)
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (which I did not)

Hope to do better in February but I still have a load from the library. I really need to stop reading book reviews!

>9 karen_o: hee hee, I know the pain! ;)
2 is a good start! Just try to stay away from that pesky library..... (easier said than done..) :)

2 books is good!

>10 avanders: That might be difficult for some! But it's worth a try.

Well, it's seemingly impossible for me! Another month down to the library but I recently got the courage to push off all my reserves until late April and returned 3 volumes unread. Whew! March will be better!

February's meager ROOT total was:
Still Life With Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo (although I must confess I didn't own it when I read it. Is that cheating? ;) )
Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekback

Only a little. But we'll forgive you. :)

>11 connie53: so true! (for me too ;))
And congrats on your ROOTs! Progress is progress :)

Thank you, thank you. So good to have understanding folks around me. ;)

But March is going really well; four down and two in progress!

March was an awesome month for ROOTs with 6 completed (and one in slow progress). The finished ones were:

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsberg
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
What You Left Behind by Samantha Hayes
The Devil's Workshop by Alex Grecian
Peaches for Monsieur le Curé by Joanne Harris
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye by Rachel Joyce

Perhaps I shouldn't say I "completed" The Devil's Workshop since I deliberately left it unfinished -- too many books, too little time -- but I spend enough time on it to form a solid opinion so on the list it goes!

Congrats on all the ROOTs for March!

>16 karen_o: woo hoo congrats!

Some great reading there in March!

Have a good April month too. With ROOT and other things.

Thank you for the kind words, my friends; March was a particularly good month and April hasn't been too shabby, either, except a lot of library holds came in...

I'm doing this a bit early, I know, but given the length of the book I'm currently reading I'll be lucky to even finish it within the month, let alone have time or anything else. So, March's ROOTs were:

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths by Harry Bingham
Marriage Can Be Murder by Emma Jameson
Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon

So... not terrible, I guess, but not fab either.

Currently reading Voyager the third in the Outlander series but since I just started this morning I can't imagine being done by the end of the week! Not nearly enough time to spend reading this week as I'd like. :(

I really love the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, Karen. But they are all very big books!

>21 karen_o: but no worries as you're more than 1/3 done w/ the challenge!

>22 connie53: They certainly are! And I've decided I'm counting Voyager for April since I managed to read more than two-thirds of it before it turned May !

>23 avanders: perfect timing, isn't it?

>24 karen_o: it exactly is ;)

Only two so far this month, but there's a week left so I hope for at least one more.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon

(I swear that last one should be worth 2 books at least! LOL )

>26 karen_o: Agree! They are all BIG BOOKS.

Only managed to read four total books in June, but all four were ROOTs!

Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler
Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
Death in an English Cottage by Sarah Rosett
The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabladon

And for Connie (and others who've read the Outlander series, you'll understand that the 1,456 pages of that last one are the reason I only read 4 books this month! Whew!

(That page count, btw, is from the Kindle product details -- I own the trade paper but read it on my Kindle to save my elbows. ;) )

Just realized that at 23 ROOTs read for the year and a goal of 45, I'm on pace to make that goal. If I quite reading Gabaldon's books, that is.

Only one book down for the month of July so far, but it was a big one: number 6 in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, A Breath of Snow and Ashes.

(To remind myself -- no updating of tickers until the end of the month.)

Dos mas --
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

>31 karen_o: wow, quite the duo! What did you think of them?

>32 avanders: That's my question too. I'm very curious what you thought of book by Michel Faber.

>32 avanders: I loved both of them!
>33 connie53: It's hard to say why I liked the Faber book so much but I fell into it from the very beginning and never fell out. I like Faber's writing style, I like the quirkiness of his characters -- a feature in others of his books, I like the odd situations he creates even when they completely creep me out (Under the Skin).

And in the back of my mind while I was reading was the knowledge that during the time he was writing this book, his wife was dying; he said he ended up with a very different book than he'd set out to write as a result of that so my mind was constantly busy trying to figure that out. He has said this will be his last book; I hope he changes his mind.

And one more down: an LTER win from May called Love Maps by Eliza Factor

Note to self: Adding to the tickers now!

>34 karen_o: Thanks, Karen, for your answer. I'm definitely going to read that book now. It's on the soon-to-be-read pile and moving up.

>34 karen_o: thanks for the update! The Faber book is on my short-list :) Now even more so! (hee hee Connie, we often do seem to have similar reading lists!)
oh that's sad about his wife -- I didn't know :(

I must confess that the Faber was a recent choice of one of my book groups and "love" was not the most common sentiment. There were two of us that felt that way, one who was sort of mediocre, and three that pretty much hated it. To each his own, right?

>38 karen_o: Right. Tastes may differ!

>37 avanders: We do, don't we! I wish some of you lived nearer to me so I could get to know them in RL.

Ended up finishing one more before the month ended, another LTER win from a couple of months ago called Last Night at the Blue Angel. Loved the book but the ending is still rankling with me.

>39 connie53: That would be fun! *And* we could swap books! Oh, how the TBR list would grow...

>41 avanders: Right! Is that a good or a bad thing, I wonder. ;-))

>42 connie53: lol I see it both ways.... ;)

>43 avanders: LOL. You would have to take some lessons to read Dutch books, Ava.

>44 connie53: lol very true... I know not a lick of Dutch!

We can start private lessons anytime ;-))

>46 connie53: enticing! ;)

Pick me, pick me! I only speak English and Spanish. I can read Spanish, but it is slow and not enjoyable. I've always wanted to learn another language and I've been thinking of German or Russian, but Dutch would be ok!

My ex-husband's grandparents were from the Netherlands; he was stationed there in the 1970s and he spoke a little Dutch. At one point he was teaching our daughter her numbers in Dutch but the only thing I remember is the word for 12. :)

>49 karen_o: that's more than I know! (though I could tell you it in Spanish. Like most people I guess?)

>49 karen_o: Twaalf!

Een, twee, drie, vier, vijf, zes, zeven, acht, negen, tien, elf, twaalf!

Goedemiddag, ik heet Connie en ik woon in Nederland!

Yep -- twaalf! Although I've never seen it written before.

I was going to say I can count to twelve in both Spanish and French but I just tried it in French and flopped after 10. *sigh*

It seems like I didn't read a thing this month. There must have been books I forgot to record, but for what I do remember, here it is:

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard

and, um, I guess that must be it? Maybe something else will come to me...

>52 karen_o: There is a first time for everything.

>53 karen_o: I hope it does too!

Alas, this has been a library month. Only one from my own shelves and that one only recently added: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

>55 karen_o: what did you think of it? I haven't read either... but I have heard so much about this sequel. Both are on my list!

>56 avanders: -- I can't rate it so it's hard for me to say if I liked it, but I'm glad I read it. How's that for fence sitting? :) It was most interesting to me as a sort of academic exercise (using that term loosely) in that, according to recent press, her agent told her to rework Watchman into a story from the younger Scout's POV (Mockingbird). It's astonishing to me that an agent could see the need for that so clearly and how well it worked!

In Watchman, the character of Atticus comes off as, yes, a racist -- but also very much a man of his times. The book is more about the film of adoring childhood being torn from a young woman's eyes. While in Mockingbird Atticus is the hero and Scout is learning how to live from her father, in Watchman Scout is the hero and is failing to teach anyone how to live.

Given the politics of the time Mockingbird was published (1960) it became an American classic and one of the best loved books in the country; had Watchman been published instead it would have sold few copies and quickly faded into obscurity. I guarantee few if any of us would ever have heard of Harper Lee if her agent hadn't prevailed and for that reason, it's worth the read.

Again, I haven't read much this month, unfortunately.

13, Rue Therese by Elena Mauli Shapiro (which I didn't actually finish)

And the next three are all recent acquisitions for the Kindle, recommended by a reading group friend in Britain. They are great good fun and very quick reads about a group of time-traveling historians -- doing real-time historical research. ;)

Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor
A Symphony of Echoes
A Second Chance

So, I'll add 4 to the tickers and hope I step it up for the last two months of the year!

>57 karen_o: well, fence sitting or no, it is actually helpful ;)
I'm looking forward to eventually getting to them.....

Only 4 again this month; don't know where the time is going --

A Trail Through Time by Jodi Taylor
The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

>60 karen_o: There a lots of days left, Karen. Or did you mean November?

Yep, that was November. And December hasn't been any better! But I have the whole next week off of work and plan to read at least some of that time. ;)

This month I became enamored of a series of genealogical mysteries by Steve Robinson; the three I've read so far have all been set in England even though the protagonist and chief genealogist is an American named Jefferson Tayte. So those were In the Blood, To the Grave and I'm currently almost through The Last Queen of England.

My only other read so far this month was Circling the Sun by Paula McLain which I didn't even finish. I didn't dislike it -- in fact, I liked it a great deal more than The Paris Wife -- but it just wasn't compelling enough to keep me from doing other things, especially at this time of year. But it's off my shelf so I'm counting it, unfinished or not.

And that gives me 4 for December which puts me only two short of my goal for the year. Hope I can fix that in the next few days; I'd hate to be so close and still fall short.

I'm sure you can read the two books, Karen!

So close - you can do it!!

Sadly, I did not. I read one really short book -- A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

But I did knit a really pretty pair of fingerless mitts on Tuesday and went to a movie with my daughter on Wednesday, so the week wasn't a total loss. :)

>65 karen_o: Knitting is still good! I am in a huge knitting slump -- can't be bothered to finish any of my projects.

>65 karen_o: no worries! Still, 44 ROOTs is fantastic!
And sounds like a great week! :)