mabith's 2018 ROOTs (Meredith)

After a year (or two?) absence I'm back to hopefully help myself get back to some of my owned books. I don't actually buy all that much I've never read before, being a dedicated library user and preferring my shelves to hold books I love, but I bought more than usual in the past couple years.

I have two shelves, one fiction and one non-fiction for books I want to read "soon" which are almost unchanged from 2016. My goal this year is 20, but I'm hoping to read two per month.



Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Nobody's Child by Marie Balter
Off the Shelf edited by Carol Ann Duffy
The Backwash of War by Ellen N. La Motte
The Queen of Whale Cay by Kate Summerscale

Where We Once Belonged by Sia Figiel

Welcome back, Meredith. Happy ROOTing.

Welcome back, and enjoy your ROOTing through 2018!

Happy rooting 2018!

Welcome back and happy reading!

Good luck with your ROOTing goals in 2018!

Welcome back and have a great reading year!

Thanks! As usual, ROOTers are the friendliest folks!

1. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Perhaps Kawabata's most famous book, set in the snowiest region of Japan. It started out with a number of short stories about the same characters, which potentially explains why it didn't feel very cohesive.

It's generally about a man who is torn between his family and a woman he loves in a mountain resort town. I wasn't overly pleased with it. Didn't hate it by any means, but didn't love it or feel very interested in it while reading. It's a classic of Japanese literature though, and one of the novels mentioned by the Nobel committee that gave Kawabata the prize for the literature.

I have another short novel by Kawabata on my shelves and I'm not sure whether I'll read it now (wouldn't like to judge an author based on one novel though, and it was published over ten years after Snow Country).

>9 mabith: on my wishlist - I've noticed several ROOTers reading this but not loving it which is sad because the title alone seems promising!

Nice to see you here. Good luck with your ROOTing.

>9 mabith: That is a beautiful cover, even the book was a bit lackluster for you.

>10 floremolla: Donna, I think if you like quieter books it could be a good fit? I have a feeling the mid-century Japanese classics will often be hard for me, as the focus is unlikely to be on deep characterization.

>11 avidmom: It is a nice one! Not the same as my copy, but I get cover images for all my books and print a custom calendar every year (so Jan. 2018 shows the books I read in Jan 2017), so I just pick the cover I like best that's also good enough quality.

Welcome to the group! Hope you have a good year reading :)

>12 mabith: That's such a cool idea for a calendar!

>12 mabith: I do like a quieter book at times, so I'll keep it on my wishlist - thanks for that helpful comment!

>13 Jackie_K: Thanks!

>14 rabbitprincess: I've done it for four or five years now, and really love it. I just add the images as I finish the books, so it's not onerous or anything. Love looking back.

>15 floremolla: I like them when I feel like I really know the characters, otherwise they just don't usually work so well.

2. Nobody's Child by Marie Balter

This is a memoir originally written in the 1980s under the title Sing No Sad Songs. Balter was raised in an orphanage until she was 5 when she was adopted by an Italian couple (who ONLY spoke Italian, while Balter only spoke English, tough start!). They were extremely strict to the point of abuse, and especially oddly, greatly restricted her from having friends.

When Balter was sixteen or seventeen (in the 1940s) she had her first serious episode of depression and anxiety after trying to live on her own away from abusive parents. She had her first stay in a mental hospital, Danvers State Hospital (the Castle), and then spent most of the next 20 years in and out of the hospital. At this time they were often using straight jackets, wet wraps (where the body is wrapped tightly in cold towels so the person cannot move at all), and shock treatments as punishments. These treatments are controversial enough even when people genuinely think they will help, let alone simply as punishment. After being treated with massive doses of stelazine (even though it was for schizophrenics) her health suffered greatly and she began to have vivid hallucinations. She stayed in bed and didn't speak for about two years.

It's not the best piece of literary memoir ever written, but it's interesting story and an important work. Balter struggled mightily to recover and to make a life for herself, and also to continue her education until she got to the point where she could help other mentally ill people, and especially to help people transition from institutionalization.

Glad you're with us!

I've gotten behind in my ROOTs so tried to start catching back up in April.


3. Off the Shelf: A Celebration of Bookshops in Verse edited by Carol Ann Duffy

Wonderful little poetry collection sent to me by a friend. Nice read, and obviously a perfect gift for a book (and poetry) lover.

4. The Backwash of War by Ellen N. La Motte

This is an amazing work. La Motte is righteous with anger and the book is full to the brim with bitter sarcasm. This is a tone you don't see that often in WWI memoirs, particularly those written while the war was going on. She was one of the first American war nurses to work on the continent, and had this published in 1916. It was quickly suppressed after the USA entered the war and wasn't republished until 1934.

"A rose is a fine rose because of the manure you put at its roots. You don't get a medal for sustained nobility. You get it for the impetuous action of the moment, an action quite out of keeping with the trend of one's daily life. You speak of the young aviator who was decorated for destroying a Zeppelin single-handed, and in the next breath you add, and he killed himself, a few days later, by attempting to fly when he was drunk. So it goes. There is a dirty sediment at the bottom of most souls. War, superb as it is, is not necessarily a filtering process, by which men and nations may be purified. Well, there are many people to write you of the noble side, the heroic side, the exalted side of war. I must write you of what I have seen, the other side, the backwash. They are both true."

"Since he had failed-in the job, his life must be saved, he must be nursed back to health, until he was well enough to be stood up against a wall and shot."

“I was mobilized against my inclination. Now I have won the Medaille Militaire. My captain won it for me. He made me brave. He had a revolver in his hand.”

"He had performed no special act of bravery, but all mutilés are given the Croix de Guerre, for they will recover and go back to Paris, and in walking about the streets of Paris, with one leg gone, or an arm gone, it is good for the morale of the country that they should have a Croix de Guerre pinned on their breasts."

5. The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water by Kate Summerscale

This is the book that started Summerscale's non-fiction writing career. Carstairs god-daughter sent a letter to the Daily Telegraph that ended up on Summerscale's desk. She'd seen the notice of Carstairs' death in the paper and thought her godmother a good subject for an obituary. She included a number of newspaper articles, and when Summerscale looked up Carstairs in the Telegraph's libraries she found a heap of notices on her racing career in the 1920s (establishing herself as the fastest woman on water, always dressed in men's clothing). Then articles about Carstairs' buying and transforming of an island in the Bahamas.

Carstairs was an absolutely fascinating character. Plenty of flaws, and maybe not someone I'd enjoy being around, but just fascinating. Summerscale must have moved with speed to track down people who'd known Carstairs, who was born in 1900 and died in 1993. She drove ambulances in WWI and in post-war Ireland, she started a car touring company with friends, she commissioned and raced motorboats, she had scores of girlfriends, and she bought the island, Whale Cay. (Her maternal grandfather was a founding partner of Standard Oil, if you're wondering where the money was coming from.)

Highly recommended. A shortish book, but well done.

>20 mabith: That looks brilliant!

Is there a way to make a list, on your own page, of books to look for, (that you find when cruising conversations), without having to leave the page you found it?

>22 roomsofbooks: It was really good! As for saving books, I think the only way is to keep your own list. I keep a list in my word processor and sometimes in paper notebooks.

Where We Once Belonged by Sia Figiel

I spent too long working on this book. Not because I didn't like it but because partly it's hard reading in print with physical pain (and emotional pain) and that was made a bit harder due to the all the Samoan. Luckily for me, my power went out for six hours recently and I had no choice but to read in print! Maybe I should arrange to have the power cut for one to two hours every day...

The book was really good, though it suffered from my slow, spread out reading. This is definitely one to read more quickly. As I said there's a lot of Samoan, some of which is in the glossary in the back and some of which isn't. It can pretty much all be googled and a fair bit you can get from context.

It's one of those books which is foreign and familiar. Alofa is a teenage girl and we're witness to her family, friends, inner thoughts, school life, and experiences with love, sex, and violence.

Really good read, if challenging.