I finally finished Roots last night after spending very large portions of the day engrossed in it. I'm glad I read it, I enjoyed it, yet at the same time it annoyed me that it took that long to finish. I guess I've just gotten to the point where almost nothing (fiction at least) takes more than about a week and it seems strange to me to spend more time than that reading. Parts of the book were depressing, but not nearly as much as it could have been. The characters were not really complaining about their lives (which indeed had much more that was deserving of complaints than I've ever had) but celebrating the things that were good.

One thing the book did make me wish (at least a little) was that I knew more about my family. All of my grandparents were born in the U.S. and I really don't know how far beyond that you'd have to go to find immigrants. I've heard a few stories here and there about relatives, but not very many. Imagining an oral tradition of family lore that stretches back 7 generations is rather amazing to me. At the end of the book Haley tells about how he researched the family history and found it to link up with the oral traditions in Africa. My family definitely wouldn't be able to do that.

And yes, I did occasionally feel guilty about being white.
posted by Kristin Buxton at 11:44 AM