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 Reading for Book Clubs

You may recall, I attended a bookclub several years ago.  They were reading Frankenstein, which I'd been meaning to get to for years.  It was an okay evening, but the next few books were things I'd never felt any interest in, so I stopped going.

I've often felt resentful over being forced to read things I'm not interested in.  I think this stems from being forced to read specific books at school.  We'd always read as a group, and it was so slow.  If I'd been allowed to read myself, it would have taken half the time.  But, no, I had to listen to some eejit stammering over words and taking ages to come out with the simplest things.  So frustrating.  So I think I probably had a similar issue with bookclubs suggesting I read things I didn't want to.

My feminist group started a bookclub about a year ago.  At first, my attendance was patchy - couldn't always afford the book, couldn't always get time off to go, sometimes just completely forgot.  Now I'm working the first problem's solved, and I've booked those days off as holiday for the rest of the year.  I get most of then back as my natural rest days anyway.

It helps that it's a small group, and it's amongst people I know and it also helps that it covers a topic I like, so I find reading the books quite interesting and rewarding.

I've started going to another bookclub since then.  A coworker recommended John Scalzi's Red Shirts to me, and when looking at MeetUp a little while later, I noticed a local group was planning to read it.  I enjoyed that meeting, and went to the next one, since it was sci-fi themed and I was free.  Also, because the book had happened to be sitting on my unread shelf for a few years.  Again, it's a small group of people that I like, and the books are things that I'm interested in.  Since we're all fairly fast readers, they've started a midweek book group, as well as the general one, which I've also been going to.  So that's three!

This month, I've actually chosen two of the books.  Sheri Tepper's Plague of Angels, and Colette Dowling's Myth of the Money Tree, both books I've read and enjoyed previously.  I'm quite looking forward to discussing both of them!

I've also been rereading The Dice Man, which I haven't read in a good five years.  I'm still listening to Firestarter on audiobook, though I stopped for a bit.  Making it a daily habit on HabitRPG has really helped me get back into it.  I'm also listening to The High Lord intermittently.