In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 26th Year, Week 1/52

These are the four books I finished in the week since turning 26, on the 12th of August.

The Myth of the Money Tree is a book I've read before.  I actually reread for my feminist bookclub - it was my suggestion.  Unfortunately, I was the only one who was able to make it that weekend, so it didn't happen.  Shame; it's quite an interesting book, about some of the issues women typically have with handling money due to social attitudes.  It was originally published in 1998, so not as relevant today as it used to be, but it still spoke to me.  Interestingly, new copies are going for almost £2500 right now while second hand copies are a penny.

I picked up the book on keyboards because I got myself a keyboard for my birthday.  I've found it the best way to distract myself from being depressed.  Last time it got this bad, learning to play the guitar worked pretty well so I guess I'm trying to repeat the trick.   This was a decent guide for total beginners, and a good refresher for people as rusty as me.  It talked through the basics of music theory and playing the keyboard, and it has some easy sheet music at the back to practice on.  I borrowed it from the library, which is probably best as it's about sixty pages long and shouldn't take more than a few hours to work through.

Ancillary Justice, I read for a bookclub, which I wasn't well enough to attend in the end.  It was okay; I couldn't really pay attention to it at the beginning, which made it a bit trickier to follow later on.  I wrote a fuller review here.

I finally finished Firestarter.  I've read it before, but this time I listened to the audiobook, which was nearly fifteen hours long.  I guess I just got really into listening to music for a month - I started this on the 4th of June and didn't finish it until the 17th of August.  I listened to about eight hours of it last week, most of it on 1.5 or double speed, which I hadn't done before.  Turns out, it's actually easier to focus at that speed.  How strange.

Firestarter was never one of my favourite King novels, although I've now read it three or four times, which puts it ahead of most of the others.

At the moment, I'm reading quite a lot of books at once.  Mostly non-fiction, because that doesn't make me feel stuff.  I should be able to mark a few of them as finished soon.

In Which We Discuss Ancillary Justice

Let's go to wikipedia.

Ancillary Justice is a science fiction novel by the American writer Ann Leckie, published in 2013. It is Leckie's debut novel and the first in her "Imperial Radch" trilogy of space opera novels. The novel follows Breq — the sole survivor of a starship destroyed by treachery, and the vessel of that ship's artificial consciousness — as she attempts to revenge herself on the ruler of her civilization.

I read this recently for a book group.  Unfortunately, I won't be able to make the actual discussion, so I'm going to write a brief review here.

At first, I wasn't that into the book.  I just couldn't pay attention to anything in the first chapter or two, which meant I was hopelessly confused as to what was happening where and when and to whom later on.  Even with that, the novel really picked up and became quite absorbing towards the end.

I did quite like the fact that the Radchai empire didn't differentiate between genders.  Leckie got around this by using all female pronouns.  It was an interesting and slightly disorientating technique; I pictured the majority of characters as presenting as female, even though characters from other societies explicitly read them as male.  I'd have been happier with 've' personally, but it's such an unusual conceit that how it was executed is less important right now than that it was.

What was interesting about that was that it made me constantly misgender characters by picturing them all as female-signalling.  Ve or Ze wouldn't have had that effect; I'd have remained aware that I couldn't picture any gender signals because they weren't apparent/Breq wasn't picking them up.

I enjoyed the general set-up that we could see of the Radchai empire, and I liked the way it was ruled by one person in endlessly cloned bodies.  I'm not totally overwhelmed with interest, so I'm not sure yet whether I'd read the other books or not.  Glad to have had the experience though; think I gave it three stars.