In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 26th Year, Week 16/52

Six books last week!  Two of them - The Second Sex and Piano & Keyboard I'd been reading for a while.  Three of them - Monstrous Regiment, The Afterdark Princess, and Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? - were audiobooks.  Finally, The Flavours of Love had been hanging out on my unread pile for a while.

The Second Sex I read for my feminist bookclub, a meeting that never actually happened.  Everyone except me cancelled.  I'd only read half the book by the day, so I just carried on with it.  It's a brick.  An interesting read, but a long one.  It really surprised me how much of it was still current and still relevant, despite the book being written sixty-five years ago.  That's kind of sad.

Piano & Keyboard was a decent guide.  I picked up a lot of good tips and I'm glad I read it.  It really helped my musicianship.

The Afterdark Princess was a children's book I used to really like.  It was just over £7 on Audible, but I picked up three credits for £18 and decided to get it.  It's less than three hours long, so I played it through in my locker a couple of times when I was at work to try to get a few Audible badges.  Worked pretty well.

Monstrous Regiment is one of my favourite Discworld books.  Stephen Briggs is a great reader, but I really wish this book had been read by a woman.  A woman who could do great male voices.  I'd love to hear Monstrous Regiment read by a woman who could do great male voices.

I've only seen a bit of The Mindy Show and none of The Office, but I like Mindy Kaling.  And I like hearing autobiographies read by the authors, especially since they tend to be comedians or other performers.  So far, the best performance has been Michael McIntyre.  He did the best voices, especially his impression of his Hungarian grandmother.  Mindy definitely sounded like she was reading not performing, but she was reading so she can be forgiven for that.  And the book was pretty interesting.  I mostly read it while running, or while walking to work or round the supermarket.  I will not be adopting Mindy's revenge-fantasy method of exercise motivation.

Finally, The Flavours of Love.  I love Dorothy Koomson.  Her books are like chick-lit thrillers, two genres I love, and I love that all her heroines are black.  It's something that appears so seldom, which makes me sad.

I read Flavours of Love over a day; a few hours before bed, on the way to work, at lunch, while donating blood, and finished it before falling asleep the next night.  I really enjoyed it.

My unread pile is now at 102.  I'm going to try to have it under 100 on New Year's Eve.  Then, next year, my goal will be to get it to under 15, where I'll try to keep it.  That seems pretty amazing to me right now - I haven't had that few unread books in my possession since I was six or seven years old.  But I think I'll be happier when I don't have all those books cluttering up the place and making me feel guilty.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 26th Year, Week 6/52

So, welcome to the end of my 6th week as a 26-year-old.

Walk Two Moons is something of a sequel to Absolutely Normal Chaos.  It follows Salamanca Hiddle as she traces her mother footsteps - "walk[s] two moons in [her] moccasins" - and tells her grandparents the story of the last few months.  Which she spent in the same town that Absolutely Normal Chaos was set in.

Walk Two Moons is my least favourite of the trilogy, mostly due to one element.  Salamanca Hiddle is part Native American, or Nican Tlaca.  However, her mother referred to herself as 'Indian', and part of Salamanca's character development is to claim that name for herself.  However, fuck off.

I'm Indian.  My father's family came over from Gujerat in the 60s.  I understand that Native American people didn't choose to be called 'Indian' for a time, but there are unfortunate implications all over the place in this scenario.  And I resented it.  Indian is the name for people from India.  Claim your own identity, not mine.

Chasing Redbird on the other hand, is my favourite one of the trilogy, and the first one I read.  I must have been around thirteen.  Zinnia Taylor, in trying to deal with the recent death of her aunt and the more historic death of her cousin, starts trying to uncover a twenty mile trail.  I liked the characters, I liked the plot, I liked how it was played out.  It's loosely connected to the other novels in that Zinnia was once Salamanca's best friend - although Sal doesn't mention Zinny at all - and that Zinny lives in the area Sal remembers with such fondness.

I first read Life and Laughing a couple of years ago.  I like how happy Michael McIntyre is about his life.  Not all the time - he goes through trouble with family, his dad's death, unrequited love, lots of debt, and so on, and then it all works out.  I got it as an audio book because I like his stand-up and thought it would be fun to hear him do all the voices, and to actually hear the joy in his voice.  It was.

I first saw The Illustrated Treasury of Disney Songs at the library.  It has songs from the golden age of Disney, ranging from the early years of Minnie's Yoohoo to the 90s, with vocal lines and the bass and treble lines for piano.  I like it.

Cujo was better than I remembered.  I read it over two or three days, then got through The Running Man in another two.  It was okay.  Short.  I preferred Play or Die.  I'll go into why more in my longer post about that.

I'd heard about If On A Winter's Night, A Traveler a couple of times, and it sounded interesting.  The overarching plot is about you, (yes, you reader) reading Italo Calvino's new novel If On A Winter's Night, A Traveler.  However, various shenanigans mean that, instead, you end up reading the beginning of ten different novels, none of which you are able to finish.  Once you have read these novels, the framing text begins to take on elements of them, ie, after reading a detective story, the narrative takes on elements of that.

Finally, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.  This was the third Sherlock Holmes book published, following A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four which were both novel-length adventures.  Adventures is a collection of short stories originally published in The Strand magazine, and this collection includes The Speckled Band, The Red-Headed League, and the Adventure of the Copper Beaches, among others.  I first read it when I was somewhere between nine and twelve.  I reread it during quiet moments at work this time round - the entire book is on wikisource along with all the other Sherlock Holmes stories and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's other works.