Musing Mondays - What I'll read next & my worst habit as a reader

Musing Mondays - October 3, 2016

Musing Mondays is a weekly meme that asks you to choose one of the following prompts to answer:

• I’m currently reading…

• Up next I think I’ll read…

• I bought the following book(s) in the past week…

• I’m super excited to tell you about (book/author/bookish-news)…

• I’m really upset by (book/author/bookish-news)…

• I can’t wait to get a copy of…

• I wish I could read ___, but…

• I blogged about ____ this past week…

Up next I think I’ll read…

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

I'm a huge and life long Disney fan, and I've always been fascinated by the man himself. For the Book Riot 2016 Read Harder challenge, one of the requirements is to read a biography (not an autobiography of a memoir). I'd been struggling for MONTHS to figure out what I was going to read because biographies are not something I ever, ever read. Then one day I was looking at the biography lists on Goodreads and this jumped out at me, and I knew it was fate, destiny, especially once I checked and found that there was a copy of it living on the shelves at work. I immediately went upstairs the next day and checked it out, after putting a hold on it to be sure no one would get to it before me. So now that I've *finally*, after almost a month, slogged my way through Our kind of Traitor I am in the midst of reading the last book from the batch I borrowed from the public library (What if? by the author of the web comic XKCD - also for the Book Riot challenge.), which means that I can read this one next if I want to, and I very much want to.

Because non-fiction is not something I usually read and this is a BIG book (over 600 pages), I plan to reward myself for every 175 pages of reading by reading a volume of Akira because I read the first volume a few weeks back and now I want to read the other 5.

Here's the summary from Goodreads:

From Neal Gabler, the definitive portrait of one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American entertainment and cultural history.Seven years in the making and meticulously researched - Gabler is the first writer to be given complete access to the Disney archives - this is the full story of a man whose work left an ineradicable brand on our culture but whose life has largely been enshrouded in myth.Gabler shows us the young Walt Disney breaking free of a heartland childhood of discipline and deprivation and making his way to Hollywood. We see the visionary, whose desire for escape honed an innate sense of what people wanted to see on the screen and, when combined with iron determination and obsessive perfectionism, led him to the reinvention of animation. It was Disney, first with Mickey Mouse and then with his feature films - most notably Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi - who transformed animation from a novelty based on movement to an art form that presented an illusion of life.We see him reimagine the amusement park with Disneyland, prompting critics to coin the word Disneyfication to describe the process by which reality can be modified to fit one's personal desires. At the same time, he provided a new way to connect with American history through his live-action films and purveyed a view of the country so coherent that even today one can speak meaningfully of "Walt Disney's America." We see how the True-Life Adventure nature documentaries he produced helped create the environmental movement by sensitizing the general public to issues of conservation. And we see how he reshaped the entertainment industry by building a synergistic empire that combined film, television, theme parks, music, book publishing, and merchandise in a way that was unprecedented and was later widely imitated.Gabler also reveals a wounded, lonely, and often disappointed man, who, despite worldwide success, was plagued with financial problems much of his life, suffered a nervous breakdown, and at times retreated into pitiable seclusion in his workshop making model trains. Gabler explores accusations that Disney was a red-baiter, an anti-Semite, an embittered alcoholic. But whatever the characterizations of Disney's personal life, he appealed to the nation by demonstrating the power of wish fulfillment and the triumph of the American imagination. Walt Disney showed how one could impose one's will on the world.This is a masterly biography, a revelation of both the work and the man - of both the remarkable accomplishment and the hidden life.

          THIS WEEK’S RANDOM QUESTION: What is your worst habit as a reader?

This is an EASY one! Continuing to buy more books even though I have books on my shelf waiting for me to read them that have been sitting and waiting for about 10 years is my worst habit as a reader.No I'm not kidding I wish I were. There is at least 1 book on my TBR shelf (which can be seen in photos from last week's post) that had been sitting on my shelf since 2005. How can I be sure? Because I remember buying it in England the first time I went - and that was in 2005. And I also know for a fact that there are at least 3 books sitting there that I bought while I was in high school. But I am forever seeing more books that look interesting! And then of course I end up reading most of the new books first and then it becomes a case "Weeeeell am I *really* in the mood for that old book that's been sitting there for ages? Hmm...this new book just looks so much more appealing." It really is an absolutely appalling (and expensive) habit!

Other people, would tell you that my worst habit is caving into the urges I get to peek at the end of a book while I am still reading it - but I personally don't feel like that's a bad habit because I only actually give in when I think knowing the outcome will increase my enjoyment of the journey or if I'm unsure a book will actually maintain my interest that far. Like I NEVER even had that urge with the Harry Potter books, I remember the huge fight I got into with my mother when she grabbed my newly acquired copy of Order of the Phoenix across the table at the restaurant we were at and proceeded to tell me who died at the end - so not only was I absolutely heartbroken about it but I was pissed off that I didn't even get to experience it for myself the way JKR wanted me to. Still other people would tell you that my worst habit if dog earring my pages - but I only ever do that with books I own and I enjoy when my books look well loved - my copy of The Giver for example (which is my second such copy) looks like it's been beaten up and about to fall apart because it's been reread so many times and it has water damage. Even my Harry Potter  hard cover 1st editions have dog eared pages, which is actually probably one of my biggest regrets AND why I bought a second set, so I could reread them and not worry about how much I abused them, same with my Chronicles of Narnia hardcovers from the 40s which have been beaten up since I was a kid because they were my mum's from when she was a kid. My poor copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is the most beaten up because it was my favourite book growing up so I read it all the time.