BTT: To Share and Discuss (Books)

http://btt2.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/discussion/

Do you have friends and family to share books with? Discuss them with? Does it matter to you?

(Deb's comment: "Personally, I almost can’t remember the last time I was able to really TALK about a book I’d read with someone else who’d read it, and haven’t really been able to since my best friend and I devoured the same books in high school. Thank God for the internet.")

My answer: Some books, sometimes! My brother like me likes to listen to audio books in English and when he finds something he thinks I might like, he lends it on to me (or makes copies). We don't always share exactly the same favourites but we do both have a certain preference for fantasy, British humour and classical mysteries.

In the past, I sometimes talked about books with my mother, but during the last few years of her life she did not read much. She preferred realistic novels. She and her sister used to talk about books too; now my aunt and I occasionally share some reading tips.

I also have a couple of old friends that I sometimes talk to about books. Or write to, with one of them.

Between the 6th and 7th Harry Potter books, I took part in discussions in a Harry Potter internet forum - The Leaky Lounge - and especially the subforum Academic Analysis: Obscurous Books - which was a new experience to me, and I enjoyed it immensely. The discussions often went way beyond HP and it revived my interest in book discussions generally, and inspired me to read classics I'd never got round to before, and to reread some that I hadn't read since my college days. It made me aware how much I had missed that kind of discussions.

Six months or so after the last HP book... I began to feel that perhaps it was time to move on (not to get stuck in the wizarding world forever)... That's when I entered the blog world. In the beginning I probably focused more on books and book reviews in my blogging - not really knowing what else to write about... (I also started a special HP blog Through My Spectrespecs to collect some of my thoughts from those discussions; I haven't been updating it very frequently though.) Then photography took over, and some other more personal stuff. But I have also found some blogging friends along the way that I enjoy sharing occasional book reviews and opinions with. Like Rae @ Us In Tejas (hi). And a few months back I found these Booking Through Thursday questions, which I have since enjoyed participating in.

Does it matter to me? Yes, it does! Discussions with old and new friends challenge and inspire me to find out more about all kinds of things I might otherwise not have bothered to give a second thought. This goes for both books and all kinds of random blogging topics.