mstrust ROOTs Through the Shelves

Hi, I'm Jennifer, and I believe this is my fourth year of ROOTing. I made my goal for ROOTs last year and that felt good, especially the part about reading what I already own since I have right around 3500 books in the house. My goal again is to hit 50% ROOTs.
Thanks for visiting, and I'm going to try to get round ROOTs and visit you too!
Current Tally as of the end of February: 9 ROOTs out of 20 total reads

2024 ROOT Reads

1. The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread
2. The Dinner
3. Phoenix Noir
4. Living Like A Runaway
5. Joe Gould's Teeth
6. The Bookshop
7. Death in the Sunshine
8. The Eyeball Collector
9. The Devil's Rooming House
10. H.P. Lovecraft: Great Tales of Horror
11. Don't Point That Thing At Me
12. Lost Hills
13. Dearly Devoted Dexter
14. Last Night at the Lobster
15. Famous Writers School: A Novel
16. The Rising of the Moon

>1 mstrust: Sounds like you have plenty of reading material, Jennifer! Love the gif! Happy New Year and happy reading!

Hi Jennifer! Happy new year and Happy ROOTing. Just curious what your goal is in numbers.

>2 Cecilturtle: I have more than enough, yet I'm buying more books for the new year. Happy New Year to you!
>3 connie53: Hi, Connie, Happy New Year! I never have a number for my goal, just 50% of my total reads.

Welcome back, Jennifer! Looking forward to seeing what gems you unearth from your shelves!

Thank you, Princess!

Hi Jennifer. I can't find you as a member of this group. If you want to you can sign up on the upper right side of the group page.

You're right, I forgot to join. Done!

Yay! Happy to see you back this year!

>9 mstrust: Good job

Good to see you again! Good luck with your 50% goal!

Thanks, Jackie, and good luck with your ROOTs!

Happy ROOTing, Jennifer!

Thanks, and to you too!

1. The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread by Don Robertson.

Set in Cleveland in 1944, this is the story of nine year-old Morris Bird III, who is a good athlete and a nice kid, though he unintentionally causes an uproar at school with "the salami sandwich incident" and allows the school bully to be blamed. Morris is an independent thinker, choosing a strange kid named Stanley Chaloupka as his best friend when the other kids think Stanley is weird. Morris is also loyal. When Stanley moves to a far away neighborhood, Morris tells him he will come see him, ditching a class field trip to spend the afternoon walking to Stanley's new home. He had expected to go alone, but at the last minute, he's saddled with taking his annoying six-year old sister with him and renting a classmate's wagon to pull her across town. Along the way the two bicker while encountering unusual and comedic situations. This is the story of a boy's daily life, and it reminded me of Jean Shepard's In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, the basis of "A Christmas Story".
*SPOILER* And then, three-quarters of the way through, it was as if the story was passed to Stephen King, because a horror befalls Cleveland and Morris and his little sister have front row seats. The characters, including children, are decimated. It's rare to find a book that goes along as a humorous slice-of-life tale, then turns on a dime like this. If Robertson wanted to startle his reader, he did it. 3.5

I've had this on the shelf for three and a half years, so it's a real ROOT.

>16 mstrust: Goodness, that sounds like quite the head-snapper, Jennifer! I'm tempted to see if the library has it, just so I can experience the dissonance for myself. Although I wonder how knowing about the twist ahead of time would affect the experience of reading the first part?

Did I give too much away? I'm always afraid of doing that, but I felt that this one needed to have the abrupt turn acknowledged. I'll place a warning in.

>18 mstrust: No, I don't think you gave too much away, because you didn't say what the big twist actually was! And I don't know how you would write a review without mentioning it, to be honest. So I think you did fine.

:-D Thanks!

This week's Autumn Lives Here looks at the Women of Horror, including Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Darcy Coates and more. Also, listen and watch stories about unbelievable scammers. I love it when they get caught!
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2. The Dinner by Herman Koch.

The narrator and his wife are meeting another couple in an exclusive, trendy restaurant that the narrator doesn't want to eat in, but the other couple chose it. He doesn't like anything about the restaurant, seeing it as snobbish and expensive. He also doesn't like the man of the other couple, who is stupid and snobbish. This turns out to be his brother. As the night wears on, the reader is given more and more reason to dislike our unreliable narrator, but we discover that the two couples have a very important matter to discuss over dinner, one that involves the future of both their families.
Taught and intense, these four diners should have been kicked out of the restaurant by the time the main course arrived.

Herman Koch is a Dutch writer and I've read that one too. You are right by calling it intense, Jennifer.

Yes, he's Dutch. I'll look for more from him, he's excellent.

3. Phoenix Noir edited by Patrick Millikin

This collection of sixteen noir short stories placed in Phoenix and the surrounding areas by authors including Megan Abbott, Lee Child, James Sallis, Diane Gabaldon and other known writers. Some stories, such as Gabaldon's and Child's, are more traditional detective stories. Luis Alberto Urrea's has a modern Romeo & Juliet angle, and Abbott's is a fictionalized account Bob Crane's death in Scottsdale.
Good writing, though some of the stories just peter out to an unsatisfying end, and I skipped over most of Sallis' because it featured graphic child abuse that was gross.

>25 mstrust: Cool - years ago I bought Tel Aviv Noir in the series; maybe time to dig it up!

I looked it up. The Akaschic Noir series runs to 123 books right now!

>27 mstrust: wow - that's nuts! There no Ottawa Noir but Paris Suburbs Noir - neat list :)

wow - that's nuts!
Isn't it? I'm surprised there's no Ottawa edition already. At this point they've got to be looking at smaller markets, like Elko, NV Noir ;-D
This is probably the third of the series that I've read, and it featured much better writers. And I also discovered that I owned two copies.

4. Living Like A Runaway by Lita Ford

I can't say that I followed Ford's solo career that much, but I'm a Runaways fan and she was the guitarist. I've read Cherie Currie's book, along with Queens of Noise, so now I've gotten to Ford's version of the Runaways years. And any way you look at it, they were tough on these teenage girls who were breaking the gender barrier in rock music, traveling over the world and going from high school kids to being idolized in other countries, while being hugely ripped off by their manager. And I have to comment on how creepy men were around teenage girls in the 70s. There are people who should be in jail.

Ford discusses the difficulties she had at a time in the industry when she was one of just a handful of female musicians who had a name. If you're interested in the names and circumstances of the famous men she's slept with, she delivers more than you might have expected. But she also has a tendency to deflect blame, whether it's for damaging a stranger's car or being fired by Michael Jackson for "having too much credibility". She's had an interesting, fast-paced life, and once she became famous, she seems to have hung out with every famous rock star. Don't expect Hemingway here; she uses an awful lot of exclamation points and sounds amazed by everyone she meets, and even amazed by herself, but it feels like she actually wrote this book on her own.

I've had this on the shelves for 3 years. It's my 4th ROOT out of a total of 9 reads so far.

The new Autumn Lives Here is celebrating Poe, new book releases and jiggly cocktails. Plus, read about "Sahara Sue Doe", a cold case from the 70s that can still be solved.
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5. Joe Gould's Teeth by Jill Lepore

Joe Gould was well-known among the Greenwich Village literati of the 1920s-40s, counting e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos and William Saroyan among his friends. For decades, Gould called himself a historian who was writing the longest book ever written, "The Oral History of Our Time". Some friends claimed to have read chapters, some even had bits that Gould gave for safekeeping, but when editors or publishers asked to see a manuscript, he dodged them.
A profile of Gould in The New Yorker in 1942 created an image of him as New York City's lovable, eccentric uncle, and Gould used this to his great advantage, constantly hitting up people in the literary world for money. The problem was, that when people cut off contact with Gould, his bad side appeared. He frequently harassed people for years.
Gould was a man of contradictions. He had many famous friends who believed he was a genius in the making, that once his book was published, he would be celebrated. But many people, including the author of The New Yorker piece, who had helped create his image of a friendly eccentric, came to believe there was no book, just a figment of Gould's grandiose imagination.
Gould believed in eugenics, even working as a field researcher, but was a hanger-on among the Harlem Renaissance. He was obsessed with Augusta Savage, a sculpture whom he stalked for decades, harassing her very badly and, even roping his famous friends into keeping tabs on her. When one friend finally told him to leave Savage alone, Gould responded by harassing the man and his family non-stop, calling and sending vile and threatening letters, even addressing some to their child.
Gould had several stays in mental institutions, but even there, one psychiatrist said he was eccentric, not insane, while another said he was a psychopath. It depended on which Gould was present that day.
People have searched for the complete manuscript of "The Oral History of Our Time". Though he did not go down in history as a literary genius, Gould is credited with coining the phrase "oral history".

This is my 5th ROOT out of 10 total reads.

6. The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Widowed Florence Green has decided that she must do something with herself, and so opens a bookshop in her little English coastal town. She expects to just make enough to get by while providing some entertainment to a town that hasn't had a bookshop in a very long time, but the importance of the shop grows among the locals. It also makes quiet, polite Florence an enemy in the form of the wealthiest woman in town, and because she must, Florence finds that she's capable of standing her ground.
It's a slim book that is packed with a lot of story and some book talk, especially about the merits of Lolita.

#6 out of 12 total reads, and I'm still on track for 50% ROOTs. I've had this one for two years.

>33 mstrust: I remember enjoying this book. I read it in French. Interestingly the title was translated to The Lolita Affair!

That is unexpected. The book was a portion of the story, but not that much. I liked this book, but really expected the ending to go a different way.

It's a free week at Autumn Lives Here. Isn't it time you warned the kids about the Chomper?
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7. Death in the Sunshine by Steph Broadribb

Moira took an early retirement from the London police and moved to a planned retirement community in Florida. She intends to start a new chapter, one where no one knows that she was an undercover officer who left the job under a dark cloud. But then she meets Lizzie and her husband Philip, both of whom are also retired detectives from the UK. Moira does everything she can to avoid them, until she discovers the body of a woman in the community pool and Lizzie and Philip are all over Moira. They bring in their retired DEA friend. Moira is again working a case, but this time her team is competing with the police to find information.

Good murder mystery with physically active retirees who have investigative skills. Moira seems too emotionally fragile to have been a career detective and the local cops are written with a heavy hand, but overall, entertaining.
This has been on my Kindle a few years.

18. The Eyeball Collector by F.E. Higgins

Hector Fitzbaudly is fascinated by the bad side of town until his wealthy father is ruined by a one-eyed blackmailer. Forced to sell everything they own, Hector is soon left an orphan and has to live among the desperate people he had been so curious about. He finds friends, but he swears to avenge his father by making the man responsible pay. As it turns out, the villain is currently living among the depraved local nobility, and Hector finds there's a job opening. Living among them, he can observe and carry out his revenge.
A grim and well-written tale of revenge set in a fictional version of the Victorian era. I've had this for a year.

9. The Devil's Rooming House by M. William Phelps

This is the true story of the Archer Home in Windsor, Connecticut, run by Amy Archer in the early 1900s. Billed as a home for the elderly and invalid, Amy charged $1000 for total care for the rest of a person's life, a business plan that only worked out for her if she kept bodies coming in with money and going out in body bags. Because of her saintly persona in the small town, and her constant letters telling relatives and officials how "hurt" she was whenever someone pointed out how high the death rates were in her house, she was able to hold off a real inspection of her house for too many years.
This is the basis for Arsenic and Old Lace, but there is a psycho, dead husbands, and a lot more dead people in the real story.

A new Autumn Lives Here is up! You'll meet a popular undertaker, make a cocktail inspired by Lovecraft, and we'll go over the movie that caused me childhood trauma. Come get creeped out!
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10. H.P. Lovecraft: Great Tales of Horror

Reading Lovecraft, you'll see exactly where American horror of the 20s and 30s made a turn, and it was with him. At the time, scary stories were something for children, still primarily Victorian in style, and written with the bloody parts alluded to but rarely shown. Though he had limited success in his lifetime, Lovecraft wrote stories of horror, but also of strangeness. Here you have multiple stories of odd young men being drawn to the odd behavior of neighbors, of devoted friends who are dealing with body invasion, reanimating the dead, and the raising of the great sea creature Cthulhu. "The Thing on the Doorstep" is one of the few that straddles the old, Victorian style while dealing with Lovecraft's modern weirdness. "Pickman's Model" deals with acute mental illness in the art world, but "The Dunwich Horror" is the greatest of Lovecraft's stories, managing to feel modern even though it's nearly 100 years old.
This volume has his greatest hits, and probably a few that are deep dives.

11. Don't Point That Thing At Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli

Alcoholic, unethical, and having received a good, if abusive, British education, Charlie Mordecai is an art historian who writes on the subject and facilitates sales of great art. But he's also willing to dabble in blackmail and murder.
In this first of the series, Mordecai is persuaded, through extreme torture, to travel across America in a Rolls Silver Ghost that will be delivered to the man who is the hit.
If you enjoy the snappy British dialogue of Wooster and Jeeves but would like it raunchier and more violent, Mordecai is a fun alternative.
This is my #11 ROOT out of a total of 22 reads, so right on track.

12. Lost Hills by Lee Goldberg

Eve Ronin has just been promoted to the robbery-homicide department in the Greater Los Angeles area police because of a viral video of her arresting a famous and violent actor. The other detectives don't like that she got there in that way, and Eve knows she has to prove herself. When she and her partner are sent to look over a blood soaked house, it's clear that multiple murders happened here, but that's all they have to go on. No bodies, no DNA. Eve, along with the task force she's heading for the first time, must find enough evidence before they can make a case of who did it.
This is the first of the Eve Ronin series, written by the author who wrote the best of the Monk novels, and the characters here briefly discuss the show. This is a gritty crime story, with both children and animals faring badly, but I'd like to continue with the series.

Happy Easter!

Thanks Jennifer. I hope you had a nice Easter too.

:-D I did, thanks.

13. Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

The second in the Dexter series, this time the Miami PD and Dexter, our charming psychopath serial killer, are trying to find "Dr. Danco", a nickname that refers to his method of turning ex-Special Ops into vegetables. Sergeant Doakes, the man who hates Dexter the most but can't figure out why, has a history with Dr. Danco and may be on the list of men being hunted. That leaves him with no choice but to work with Dexter.
It seems implausible to say these are fun reads, but Dexter is such a witty guy that they are fun.

14. Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O' Nan

While a blizzard rages outside, Manny, the manager of a Red Lobster restaurant, conscientiously goes through all the hassles and policies as if it's a normal day, but it isn't. Just days before Christmas, this is the last day of operation for this location, a place Manny has worked for years. Though he's been placed elsewhere by the corporation, he believes he will never again see Jacqui, the server he loves.
Told from hardworking Manny's POV, it's the story of a man who knows the most joy he's found is in the past, so he tries to keep his mind on his work. 3.5

>48 mstrust: I'm reading Henry, Himself by Stewart O'Nan right now. It took me a bit of time to get used to the slow pace of the novel but now I'm really enjoying it. How to you find Last Night at the Lobster ?

Lobster certainly isn't slow, in fact Manny is moving at a an incredible pace throughout the story, taking up the slack of employees who don't show up on the last day. Much of the book is about all the tasks he's doing on this last shift, which makes his despair over Jacqui more acute.

15. Famous Writers School: A Novel by Steven Carter

Wendell Newton advertises his writing course in the back of a literary magazine, stating that he will help aspiring writers through his structured lessons. He begins working with a small collection of writers, sending out assignments that are explained through personal stories, such as the time when he was a young soldier working as a secretary to a general and was able to blackmail his superior into giving him a European vacation. In turn, his students send him whatever writing they want to, such as the ex-model and stripper who writes about the people who become obsessed with her, which quickly includes Wendell. Or Linda, who sends Wendell essays about stalking him and breaking into his house. The only student who is actually writing fiction, a tense crime novel that he sends in chapters, is the one who receives Wendell's strangest replies. Over weeks of correspondence, we find Wendell to be shadier than his early professionalism let on.

A satire of the snail mail writing schools of the past, the reader is plunged into slice-of-life stories from each character that may last a few paragraphs or ten pages. It may be a kidnapping, a romance, or a snotty reply from Wendell. Expertly woven together, it's both fun and remarkably well-written. I've never heard of this book or the author. I think I picked this up at the giant booksale one year.

16. The Rising of the Moon by Gladys Mitchell

Young brothers Simon and Keith live with their older brother Jack and his wife June, a couple who are barely staying together. Their village is shocked when a performer in a traveling circus is murdered, quickly followed by another dead woman and another. The brothers begin their own investigation into these Ripper murders because much of the evidence points to Jack, but Scotland Yard sends a detective, Mrs. Bradley, who is surprised to find two young boys who can be so helpful to the investigation.

This is my first finished Mitchell, as I attempted Death at the Opera first but didn't make it past the first chapter. Going into this one, I assumed that it being a British mystery published in 1945, taking place in a village with an elderly female detective, that it would have a passing resemblance to an Agatha Christie. It really doesn't, as this village is peopled with characters who are far more broken than what you'd find in Christie. Jack and June are constantly barking at each other, miserable but unable to part. Jack, Simon and Keith are all in love with their pretty lodger Christina, who is portrayed as both intelligent and kind, yet wrestles around on her bed with the two young boys and allows them to grope and kiss her. Keith is just eleven. Mitchell's village is populated with people who are sometimes sad, angry, or jealous, so this sets it apart from the polite mysteries usually found in this era.
This is my 16th ROOT out of a total of 32 reads, so I'm doing okay.

Congrats on reaching the halfway point!

Thanks! I'm moving slowly...