LoraShouse ROOTs again - Year 3

Hi everyone. Glad to see you are all back ROOTing again.

This year my ROOT goal will once again be 20 ROOTs as that seemed to work well last year, and as I still have a lot of large list books working among my ROOTs. Once again the definition of a ROOT will be any hard copy, print, or ARD (whatever you want to call them - you know the ones) book that was in the house as of New Year's Eve in 2017. This means there are (ahem) several more books available to be ROOTs than there were last year (and the piles were pretty big last year).

I have one ROOT already finished - partly because it is one I had started before the end of the year. Make Peace with Anyone. This one was good enough that I may actually keep it. Everyone needs to know how to resolve conflicts, right?

By the way, here are my final reading stats for last year:

Reading Stats – 2017

150 of 80 Total Books
22 of 20 ROOTS
50 of 50 List Books
11 Library books
81 Kindle books
45 New Books (by request or otherwise)
25 Audible Audiobooks
0 e-book on Nook app
5 Audiobooks on Scribd
5 e-books on Scribd
2 books reread
2 books from Kindle Unlimited

I will update with this year's totals so far around the end of the month.

Welcome back, Lora, happy ROOTing in 2018

Good luck with your 2018 rooting!

Welcome back and have a great reading year!

Happy ROOTing through 2018, Lora!

Welcome back and happy ROOTing!

Good luck with your challenge!

Happy ROOTing in 2018!

Thanks everybody - this is a great group.

I finished The Temple Bombing by Melissa Fay Greene. The next ROOT I am reading is The Universe Around Us by James Jeans. It is so old it is primarily of interest as an example of the state of science 90 or so years ago. But so far an easy read for a science book. And it is interesting to see things that were a big deal then that nobody notices much now.

And since I probably won't finish it before the end of the month, here is the current state of this year's reading stats:

Reading Stats – 2018

9 of 80 Total Books
2 of 20 ROOTS
3 of 50 List Books
0 Library books
4 Kindle books
3 New Books (by request or otherwise)
1 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
1 Audiobooks on Scribd
0 e-books on Scribd
0 books reread
0 books from Kindle Unlimited

Again, some of these categories overlap.

Wow---doing great!

You are doing great! 9 books already is very impressive!

Good going, Lora!

Great work so far!

Glad you're with us!

Didn't finish any ROOTs in February because I got off into a couple of library books. However, I have finally finished The Universe Around Us and am about halfway through Night Shift, so making a little more progress there.

I also finally got to post my reviews for a book I was reading for a blog tour yesterday. This one was a Kindle book, not a ROOT. Here is the link to the tour post on my website:

https://www.ettria.com/?p=1589

Hopefully I will be done with Night Shift by the end of the month, so I will wait until then to post the latest reading stats.

Ok, finished Night Shift. Fortunately Stephen King books go quickly for the most part, even when they are long. Next up, reading Darwin's Dangerous Idea which is a list book, and also The King's Quest Companion which is not a list book, and is mostly a game guide for the King's Quest series of computer games. I think I may sort of alternate between these two, and they are both pretty big anyway, although I expect to skip through the game walkthroughs in The King's Quest Companion since I am not playing the games. I had to mostly give up on computer games, especially this series, as my husband would sit there and tell me every move to make. But my daughter and I watched him play through every one of these games. It was sort of like watching TV.

So, in case I don't finish either one of these books before the end of the month, here are the reading stats so far for this year:

30 of 80 Total Books
4 of 20 ROOTS
8 of 50 List Books
2 Library books
17 Kindle books
10 New Books (by request or otherwise)
3 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
1 Audiobooks on Scribd
2 e-books on Scribd
0 books reread
1 books from Kindle Unlimited

Hi!! I've been away and ... so much has happened! I'm happy to see you're doing so well w/ your ROOTing :)

Moving on - I finished the The King's Quest Companion and Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Just finished Darwin's Dangerous Idea tonight. So, Yay! that was kind of complicated in parts. Not so bad in others. It appears that I am reading The Lost Art of Drawing the Line next.

Here are the reading stats for the end of April. I have another book tour and somebody's book launch for early May, so I'll need to keep pushing on.

Reading Stats – 2018

45 of 80 Total Books
6 of 20 ROOTS
10 of 50 List Books
2 Library books
26 Kindle books
16 New Books (by request or otherwise)
6 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
1 Audiobooks on Scribd
3 e-books on Scribd
0 books reread
2 books from Kindle Unlimited

Looks like I am lagging a bit on ROOTs, List Books, and Library Books. So how come my total of finished Kindle books is growing so slowly? (Rhetorical question).

Thanks for stopping by! Hope you and the little one are doing well.

A little better so far this month. I finished The Lost Art of Drawing the Line yesterday, and read Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas in one day today. It's been a long time since I finished anything but a really tiny (like a kids' book) in a single day.

The next book up is Killing Custer. Hopefully I can get that read by the end of the month too, so I will refrain from posting the stats again until then.

Wishing everybody a great spring, or at least a good spring thaw!

Finished Killing Custer. Next up is Geisha. I am also reading The Fifth Miracle, which is a library book. I am making good progress on Kindle books generally after sort of a slow period in March/ April. But I am having to get a new Kindle; my Kindle Touch (my oldest Kindle) has passed on.

>26 LoraShouse: so sorry to hear about your kindle! I had to get a new kobo recently. My old one passed on too.

Just finished Geisha by Liza Dalby. This was a fascinating book written as an anthropological study by a young lady who was the first (and at the time only) American to train as a Geisha. The copy I have was a 25th anniversary edition, and even that is now ten years old. It would be interesting to see how much is still the same and how much has changed in that culture since Liza Dalby's first experiences in 1975.

On a happier note, my new Kindle Oasis came today. I am looking forward to seeing how well it does!

Meanwhile, the next ROOT up will be The Growth of the Mind.

Reading stats as of the end of May:

64 of 80 Total Books
10 of 20 ROOTS
20 of 50 List Books
4 Library books
37 Kindle books
24 New Books (by request or otherwise)
7 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
1 Audiobooks on Scribd
4 e-books on Scribd
1 books reread
2 books from Kindle Unlimited

>26 LoraShouse: Sorry to hear of the death of your Kindle. Mine was acting up a few weeks ago and I feared she might expire, but she seems to have rallied. I think she heard my husband tell me I could have his Kindle since he doesn't use it and prefers to read on his iPad mini.

>30 LadyoftheLodge: She must have had a fright there. "O my, I will be put aside and declared dead!"

Haha! I am enjoying my new Kindle Oasis, although I don't know at this point whether it is worth the price. It's buttons for page turning are nice, and it's supposed to do better in bright lights than phones and some of the other Kindles. But I didn't get a cover for it, and so haven't taken it outside to read yet.

Finished Growth of the Mind today. It talks about the relationship between emotional connections, especially in infancy, and the development of the brain's ability to think. It appears that our Buddhist idea of the unity of mind and body is becoming more and more firmly established.

The next book up is War Day. I also have this book on Kindle, as I thought I might have lost the hardcover copy I bought years ago. Fortunately, it turned up when I was looking for something else a couple of weeks ago, so I figure I'd better read it before it gets off again.

Finished Warday a couple of days ago. I had both a hardback copy and a kindle edition, because I thought I lost the hardback. It was better than I expected after reading some other Whitley Strieber stuff. I didn't like the vampire books so much. But I thought it leaned a little too much on the new political makeup of the world after the little nuclear war and not enough on how people were actually managing to live amid the radiation, increased disease, and economic havoc.

Anyway, the next book will be The King's Grey Mare by Rosemary Hawley Jarmon. Should be fun.

Anyway, here is the latest version of the reading stats for approximately the end of June:

75 of 80 Total Books
12 of 20 ROOTS
23 of 50 List Books
5 Library books
42 Kindle books
29 New Books (by request or otherwise)
10 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
1 Audiobooks on Scribd
4 e-books on Scribd
1 books reread
2 books from Kindle Unlimited

Just finished the 13th ROOT of the year - The King's Grey Mare. This one was pretty good. It tells the story of Elizabeth Woodville, wife of King Edward IV. Like the other book by Rosemary Hawley Jarman that I read a couple of years ago, Crown in the Candlelight, it focused mainly on the life of the Queen and some of the people around her (mostly women), and so had a lot or political anxiety and getting revenge for real and imagined slights. Also, there was some reference to magic. In this case, Elizabeth's mother believes herself to be descended from a water spirit, Melusine, to whom she prays to put her political friends in power. This gives the whole book a kind of unreal, almost nightmarish quality.

Finished Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende. Excellent story. Not really a romance, but had lots of love stories in it, all of different kinds.

Eliza, discovered on the doorstep of an English brother and sister living in Valparaiso, Chile as a newborn, engages in a love affair with Joaquin Andieta, an employee of her uncle's company, at the age of sixteen. When he leaves for the California gold rush in 1848, she feels compelled to follow him. A Chinese man, Tao Chi'en, helps her stow away on a ship and saves her life when she nearly dies of a miscarriage. Once in California, they have many unusual adventures while Eliza searches for Joaquin and meet a wide variety of different people. Eventually they discover they are more in love with each other than either has ever been with anyone else.

The next book is Cloud Chamber by Michael Dorris. It seems to be very well written, but so far I don't like any of the characters too much.

Reading Stats for the year so far:

84 of 80 Total Books
14 of 20 ROOTS
28 of 50 List Books
6 Library books
47 Kindle books
31 New Books (by request or otherwise)
12 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
1 Audiobooks on Scribd
4 e-books on Scribd
1 books reread
2 books from Kindle Unlimited

Finished Cloud Chamber tonight. The next book will be The River Midnight by Lillian Nattel.

Updated Stats for the year:

87 of 80 Total Books
15 of 20 ROOTS
30 of 50 List Books
7 Library books
48 Kindle books
31 New Books (by request or otherwise)
12 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
1 Audiobooks on Scribd
4 e-books on Scribd
1 books reread
2 books from Kindle Unlimited

Hi, Lora. Just catching up on threads after being away from LT for some time. I'm glad to see you have been reading a lot!

Thanks for stopping by Connie. The last time I was on, nobody seemed to have much new going on. I hoped it was because they were all so busy reading.

Finished The River Midnight this month. This was a pretty good book about a Jewish shetl in Poland around 1895. It sort of told the story of about a year from the viewpoint of several of the town's citizens. Interesting to see how each of them saw things, and what each person saw that the others did not.

I am working on Facing the Extreme by Tzvetan Todorov. This one is on moral philosophy, of all things. I'm almost halfway done, so hope it won't be too difficult. I also have another book by this name on my list that I haven't read yet by a different author on a whole different subject, but that one won't be a ROOT, as I plan to get it from the library.

In case I don't get anything else read before the end of the month, here are the latest reading stats:

99 of 80 Total Books
16 of 20 ROOTS
36 of 50 List Books
8 Library books
54 Kindle books
35 New Books (by request or otherwise)
14 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
2 Audiobooks on Scribd
5 e-books on Scribd
1 books reread
3 books from Kindle Unlimited

>42 LoraShouse: I read a book by Tzvetan Todorov earlier this year (The Fear of Barbarians). Philosophy is a discipline which I find pretty baffling, generally, but I was pleased with how much I was able to follow, I think he's a good writer and makes his points very clearly (unlike lots of philosophers!). Not that I'd claim to understand it all, but I was mostly able to keep up, so I was pleased with that!

I agree. I just finished Facing the Extreme this evening. I was afraid I would be spending a lot of time waking myself back up, but that wasn't nearly as much of a problem as it has been with books I thought I would have found more interesting. In this one he is using the reactions of people in the concentration camps and Soviet gulags (made having read The Gulag Archipelago useful) to explore moral values. He contrasts heroic virtues and ordinary virtues and also extreme vices (he never found a really satisfactory name for these) with ordinary vices.

I will move on now to The Russia House by John LeCarre. After this it should be comparatively light reading. I hope.

Keep it up, Lora!

>46 connie53: Thanks Connie!

Ok, I finished The Russia House just barely in time for this month - or not. A little disappointed in this one - it wasn't what I was expecting.

Anyway, on to the next one, The Sabbathday River. Only 2 more to get to the 20. Hopefully I will be able to read a few more after that too, but we'll see.

Reading Stats for the end of September:

118 of 80 Total Books
18 of 20 ROOTS
41 of 50 List Books
10 Library books
66 Kindle books
42 New Books (by request or otherwise)
16 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
2 Audiobooks on Scribd
6 e-books on Scribd
1 books reread
5 books from Kindle Unlimited

Finished The Sabbathday River. An extremely good book. Lots of good courtroom drama. This woman finds a dead baby floating in the river. The whole town (seemingly) jumps up and accuses this one young girl who already had a baby by a married man. The accused girl is a little strange - very immature, and still obsessed with the father of her living baby. She eventually confesses to having had another baby, but claims it was born dead and she put it in a different place. This baby is actually found where she said it would be, but the district attorney - who is so strange he makes all the other weird people in the town look sane in comparison - insists she had two babies by two different fathers at the same time, and puts up such a bogus case that finally the girl has to be acquitted. But there is much more to the story.

Next up will be I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb. That will take me to my goal of 20 books for this year, but it's a big one, so it may take a while to get through it. I hope to have time to get in one or two more before the end of the year too, but I guess we'll see.

Surprise, Surprise! I finished I Know This Much is True this month after all. I hadn't expected to because it is such a long book, and because I have ordered library books again. But even though the subject matter was pretty heavy and kind of depressing at times, the writing was so good that it was hard to put down. So, by the time I was halfway through, I was eager to get to the end and find out how they all came out.

There were a lot of surprises in this book, and a lot of things that didn't go how you thought they might. I liked this one better than the other book of his that I read (listened to, actually), She's Come Undone. Although the writing in that one was very good, I thought it kind of jumped around a lot theme-wise, and never resolved anything but sort of fizzled out. This book was better in that regard.

Here's an update on my reading statistics, as I probably won't finish any more ROOTs this month. The next two physical books I read will probably be library books. After that, we'll see. I may be able to get a couple of books past my ROOT goal this year.

Reading Stats – 2018

131 of 80 Total Books
20 of 20 ROOTS
43 of 50 List Books
10 Library books
76 Kindle books
50 New Books (by request or otherwise)
17 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
2 Audiobooks on Scribd
6 e-books on Scribd
1 books reread
5 books from Kindle Unlimited

Congratulations on reaching your ROOT goal!

Great work on reaching your goal!

Well done on hitting that goal!

>53 MissWatson: MissWatson
>54 rabbitprincess: rabbitprincess
>55 Jackie_K: Jackie_K

Thanks all! I see you have done well this past month too. Congratulations all!

Finished my first book past the goal for this year - The Black Death by Philip Ziegler. This was a historical analysis of the great plague that swept Europe from 1348 - 1350. A fascinating book about a fascinating subject. There was special attention to the plague in England - possibly because more records of it survive there than other places, although he also covered Italy and France pretty well too. I have kind of a morbid fascination for the Black Plague, so enjoyed this one.

Next up reading A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton. This is the first ROOT I have read in a while that is not a list book.

It looks like a ROOT goal of 20 is working well for me so far, so I expect to keep that for next year as well. Happy reading everybody as we move into the cold end of the year!

Doing unusually well on ROOTs so far this month. I have finished A Map of the World and also Legend by Marie Lu. Both very good books, although very different. I am continuing with Prodigy, the sequel to Legend. So far it looks like an equally fast read.

At only 3 books away from my goal of 50 List Books for the year, I am taking the chance to read some ROOTs that are not List Books, hoping most of them will be fun and go quickly.

Continuing to make good progress this month. I blew through the rest of the Legend series by Marie Lu - Prodigy and Champion. Very interesting books, all of them, ending with a couple of unexpected plot twists.

For the first time since joining the ROOT Challenges, I have finally reached the goal of 25 that I set my first year here (and failed miserably to meet then). I will keep reading to see how much farther I can get. The next book I am going to try will be The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It appears to be pretty long, so we'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile... Reading Stats as of this month are:

147 of 80 Total Books
25 of 20 ROOTS
48 of 50 List Books
11 Library books
83 Kindle books
55 New Books (by request or otherwise)
19 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
3 Audiobooks on Scribd
6 e-books on Scribd
1 books reread
5 books from Kindle Unlimited

I am so far behind on reviews!

Congrats on your progress!

Excellent work on your ROOT reading! :D

A bit late but Congrats on reaching and surpassing your goal.

>61 MissWatson: >62 rabbitprincess: >63 connie53:

Thanks everybody! Hope you are doing well with your reading too. I seem to recall from earlier that you were all close to or over your targets for the year.

I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Very good book. So many unexpected twists.

For my next trick, I have started on The Science of Life. This is a list book weighing in at over 1500 pages, so I expect that it won't be finished until next year. It's going to be challenging to hit next year's goal of 50 list books as the more of them I finish, it seems like the larger percentage of really long books remains. We are doing this again next year, right?

So, here are the reading stats for this year:

162 of 80 Total Books
26 of 20 ROOTS
50 of 50 List Books
11 Library books
93 Kindle books
64 New Books (by request or otherwise)
22 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
4 Audiobooks on Scribd
7 e-books on Scribd
1 books reread
7 books from Kindle Unlimited

I think I hit all my reading goals this year, even the unstated ones, except for Library Books. I had wanted to do 24, or at least 12, but the last one I ordered had the last copy drop out of circulation, so it never came in. Oh well.

One last update on the reading stats. This probably really is the final total, as it doesn't look like I will finish anything else before the end of the year.

Reading Stats – 2018

166 of 80 Total Books
26 of 20 ROOTS
50 of 50 List Books
11 Library books
95 Kindle books
65 New Books (by request or otherwise)
22 Audible Audiobooks
1 e-book on Nook app
4 Audiobooks on Scribd
7 e-books on Scribd
1 books reread
8 books from Kindle Unlimited

Excellent stats! Congrats on meeting your List Books target :)