LoraShouse ROOTs around in 2021

Hi. I'm baaaack! Looking for the ticker homepage to set up a new ticker.

Hi Lora! Good to see you back again! Happy ROOTing.

You found the homepage!

Welcome back and have a great reading year!

Welcome back, happy reading!

Happy ROOTing!

Happy 2021 Reading!

Wishing you good luck with your ROOTing goals this year.

Happy ROOTing!

Hi everybody! Thanks for the warm wishes. Good luck in your reading to all of you as well.

I finished Osler's Web barely in time for the end of the month. Kind of scary how Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (the subject of this book) is to the long form of covid-19. I hope the covid doesn't go on forever and ever like CFS did though. And now I see why so many people are wary of medical science.

Next month I will be working on Boundaries and Relationships.

February update: I finished Boundaries and Relationships and also finished Law and Disorder. Boundaries and Relationships was a book from my list, but YUCK! It seems to have been written for psychologists in training or something and was all psychobabble. It didn't even explain what they meant by boundaries in a way I could understand.

Law and Disorder was a little disappointing too, but not nearly as much so. It was intended as humor; a lot of short vignettes about the funny moments that happen in court. Some of them were really laugh out loud funny. Some, I suspect, may have been funnier if you had been there or knew the people involved. But a few, especially of the ones involving judges, kind of worried me a little. I have not had much experience with courts, but in what encounters with them I have had the judges mostly seemed to have been reasonably intelligent, often the most intelligent people in the room. So it was a little concerning to find some instances where the appeared to be not so intelligent. Thankfully, however, those did not constitute a very large part of the book.

Next I am working on Breaking the Patterns of Depression, another self-help psychology type book. Thankfully, this one appears to be much easier to understand than the Boundaries book, with practical suggestions and the usual exercises to work on that I never have the time to do.

3 ROOTs down! Good job, Lora. I hope your new read is better.

I finished Breaking the Patterns of Depression. This was a much better book and much easier to read. I should have done the exercises in this one, but I can never think of all the things they ask about in a reasonable amount of time. If you are suffering from a truly deep depression, this would be a good book to work with.

This one had a chapter on boundaries and another one on limits. It explained boundaries much better than Boundaries and Relationships.

I am now in the middle of The Nature of the Physical World. This is an older book (about 1929) about physics, written when the quantum theory was still a fairly new thing. It is written as a series of lectures for Oxford University. I am pretty sure that there is quite a bit of outdated stuff in here - physics, or at least the theory of it seems to change about every fifteen minutes - but so far the only thing I have actually noticed is some references to aether. The style is pretty interesting, although it is still difficult to follow some of the implications of time paradoxes and similar situations.

Reading stats as of March 30:

37 of 100 Total Books
4 of 15 ROOTS
4 of 25 List Books
0 Library books
26 Kindle books
2 New Books (by request or otherwise)
8 Audible Audiobooks
0 e-book on Nook app
0 Audiobooks on Scribd
0 e-books on Scribd
0 books reread
2 books from Kindle Unlimited
0 book did not finish

Nice stats, Lora! Happy Easter to you and yours!

Finally finished The Nature of the Physical World today.

Next up will be Miracle in Philadelphia by Catherine Drinker Bowen. I first discovered her book The Lion and the Throne when I was writing my high school term paper on Sir Edward Coke. I hope this one will be as good.

It may take longer than usual to get through it though. We need to move as soon as we can before our house falls down, so if I can get my husband out of his chair to look at places, and if we can find a suitable house we can afford, I will need to be getting moving done ASAP.

Lora, that sounds really awful. I hope you can get your husband moving and helping you to find a new place and pack your belongings.

Good luck with your house hunting!

>17 connie53: >18 mstrust: Thanks for the good wishes on house hunting. It seems we have found a house, and managed to get the first one we offered on. That's apparently rare these days. I have spent the past two weeks filling out forms and e-signing documents. If there's anybody out there that doesn't know all our business, it's because they aren't interested. Now waiting on final approval of everything so I can start on the 1001 things that need to be done before we can actually move.

And in all that, I managed to finish 2 more roots: Miracle at Philadelphia by Catherine Drinker Bowen and The Carrier by Holden Scott, both somewhat older books, but relevant in their way to what is happening in the world today. Miracle at Philadelphia is history/biography, about the Constitutional Convention and the men who attended it. The Carrier is a medical thriller, with two unusual villains, not counting the strangely mutated bacterial plague that drives the action.

I'm thinking I would like to read a book about Typhoid Mary this year. I have one on my list, and the local library has it. But when we move, we willl be going to another county, and I am not sure what their library facilities will be like.

Here are the reading stats for the year so far:

60 of 100 Total Books
7 of 15 ROOTS
12 of 25 List Books
0 Library books
39 Kindle books
6 New Books (by request or otherwise)
14 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
0 Audiobooks on Scribd
0 e-books on Scribd
0 books reread
2 books from Kindle Unlimited
0 book did not finish

Finished 1 more ROOT this month - The General's Daughter by Nelson DeMille. This was a pretty good murder mystery set on a military base. Full of witty banter between the two principle investigators - a couple of army CID types, male and female with a history of previous romantic entanglement (with each other). I tend to think it was not necessarily stunningly accurate in all the military details - although what do I know? But it did have some pithy observations on the nature and meaning of rape in a military setting - particularly rape of female cadets at West Point.

In other news, we finally closed on our new house today. I am not trying to finish any more ROOTs until after we get moved. Hopefully that will be soon.

Good luck with the move, I hope everything goes smoothly.

Yes, good luck with the move!

Congrats on your new home!

That's good news, Lora! When do you plan to move? Do you have to do things in your house first?

Note to self: get your stats in order!

Thanks everybody. We finally got moved on August 3. I didn't get back to reading ROOTs until the middle of August, and the next one I had, The Story of Philosophy took soooo long to read. I finally finished it a couple of days ago, so have a new ROOT to add at last. It was a good book; he had the biographies and brief outlines of the philosophies of a dozen or so philosophers. The biographies were good and mostly interesting. But I sometimes have trouble understanding all the philosophy. I found some I didn't know much about though.

Congrats on haveing accomplished your move. I hope you're well settled in your new home?

>27 MissWatson: Thanks! We have done most of the unpacking now. I still need to hang some of my pictures, and there are 2 or 3 small pieces of furniture I still need to get everything in place, but mostly we are done. I think.

I finished a second ROOT this month - Hotel Sarajevo by Jack Kersh. This is a story of Sarajevo during the seige. It is about a group of teenagers - mostly young teenagers - who have occupied the otherwise abandoned Hotel Sarajevo and are living by scavenging amid the war zone. It is a very sad book.

My next book will be If these Walls Had Ears which purports to be the biography of a house. It sounded interesting anyway, but since we just moved and I wish I knew the history of our new house, it seemed particularly relevant now.

Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying their reading year!

Here is the latest updated list of reading stats for this year so far. It kind of looks like this will be another year when I don't get any library books read. Since we have moved to a different county, I am no longer eligible to get books from the Nashville library, and I haven't signed up at the La Vergne library yet. I need to call Nashville to see if I can pay to keep using their stuff. Long ago you used to be able to do that, but I don't know if they still do that. If they would let me, I would probably mostly use their Overdrive collection, since even when we were living there it was like pulling eye teeth to get my husband to let me stop by to pick up physical books. The Lavergne Library, according to their website, uses Overdrive too, but they have something called Libby by Overdrive, and when I looked, it was (hopefully temporarily) not working. I don't know how good it is or how large a collection. It sounds like it would be a different collection from the regular Overdrive collection, though.

Anyway, here are the reading stats:

Reading Stats – 2021

105 of 100 Total Books
10 of 15 ROOTS
19 of 25 List Books
0 Library books
69 Kindle books
13 New Books (by request or otherwise)
25 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
0 Audiobooks on Scribd
0 e-books on Scribd
0 books reread
3 books from Kindle Unlimited
1 book did not finish

>30 LoraShouse: It was my understanding that Overdrive and Libby both provide access to the same e-book collections, and that Libby is just a new (and more user-friendly) app developed by Overdrive to access that content. But it’s been ages since I’ve used Overdrive, so I’m not really up to date on this stuff.

>31 Charon07: That's my understanding as well. My library encourages people to use Libby rather than Overdrive, since they do the same thing.

My library encourages us to use Libby as well, but for some reason it will only download books to my kobo if they are DRM-free (which most library books aren't). I think it's a weird glitch with my set-up rather than a Libby-wide thing though. So I access Overdrive directly from the kobo, which I personally find easier as far as downloading goes, although I can't see the library catalogue that way. Exploring the catalogue is much easier with Libby.

>31 Charon07: >32 rabbitprincess: >33 Jackie_K: Interesting information about Libby. Thanks guys. I'll definitely have to check it out whenever I get a chance to get signed up.

Finished If These Walls Had Ears by James Morgan. Now that was an interesting book! It told the story of the house he was living in from the time it was built in the 1920's until the time he wrote the book in the 1990's, and the various people who had lived in it.

Hi Lora. just popping in to see what you have been reading. That last book sounds very interesting. Sadly not available in Dutch.

This is likely the last time I will be on here this year. I did manage to read 3 more ROOTs this month, which leaves me 1 short of my goal of 15 for the year. I don't think I am likely to finish any more ROOTs this year. Are we doing this again next year?

My three books this month were:
Your Mental Health: A Layman's Guide to the Psychiatrist's Bible by Allen Frances, M.D. and Michael B. First, M.D.
Instant Analysis by David J. Lieberman, Ph. D
Believing It All: Lessons I Learned from My Children by Marc Parent

Your Mental Health was an explanation of the various terms in the DSM-IV, a reference for mental health professionals. Given the possibly tedious subject matter, it was pretty interesting and matched up with most of what other books on mental health I have read.

Instant Analysis is more of a self-help type book. In some ways it covers some of the same ground as Your Mental Health, but it is definitely for people who are not very seriously mentally impaired, although some of the self-help exercises might be useful as supplementary work for somebody trying to work out a more serious problem with a mental health professional. I mostly read this one right now because I knew it would be a quick read.

Believing It All is a touching memoir about the joys and frustration of raising very young boys. I had read Marc Parent's earlier book, Turning Stones: My Days and Nights with Children at Risk about his experiences with a social services agency in New York that dealt with children who might be in danger. That was an eye-opening book, and I wanted to read his later book because of it.

Here is a list of my reading stats for this year. The "other" books are hard copies that I bought and read during the year rather than ROOTs. Actually, they were books I got for my grandkids, but I had to read them before they took them off:

Reading Stats – 2021

132 of 100 Total Books
14 of 15 ROOTS
25 of 25 List Books
0 Library books
85 Kindle books
15 New Books (by request or otherwise)
30 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
0 Audiobooks on Scribd
0 e-books on Scribd
2 other books
0 books reread
3 books from Kindle Unlimited
1 book did not finish

Hi Lora, the group is happening again next year - here's the link:

https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/23590/2022-ROOT-CHALLENGE

Looks like you had a good reading year! See you in the 2022 group :)