reading challenge, Reading Rush

Reading Rush 2020: day 6

Praise be to wet weather and mandatory face coverings.

A slow day at work means I’m now back on track!

I had ‘The Communist Manifesto’ as my prompt for ‘a book beginning with the word The It’s a short read so I had planned to read it today anyway as I knew I wouldn’t have much time to read due to working a long day. However it was a really quiet day at work so I found myself being able to sneak in a bit of reading.

I picked this up a while ago and it intrigued me. It was a nice looking book, (small hardcovers always draw my eye) I’d heard a bit about it, and thought it might be something that looked good on my reading CV. Also, not knowing a great deal about politics I always wondered “What’s so bad about communism?”

Growing up in the 80s you find that most American Tv and Film baddies were ‘Commies’ or if anything bad was happening it was blamed on the ‘Commies’. So I grew up with the mindset that Communism = bad people, without ever questioning it. I actually looked up the definition once.

Communism is an economic ideology that advocates for a classless society in which all property and wealth is communally-owned, instead of by individuals.

In my mind that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, so why are communists perceived as being the bad guy? To answer that I think you’d have to drag my mind out of the naïve vision of the world being one big hippie commune where everybody contributes to society, and we all trade for goods rather than use money. Alas, I don’t think I’m ready to leave that little happy place in my mind.

Maybe real world Communism is a distorted version of the definition, or maybe it works and just because we live in a Capitalist society it’s a scary thought. Unfortunately I don’t have the capacity for deep political thinking, and it’s definitely too heavy a subject for me to go into on this little book blog. I will just live with the fact that Communism ‘seems’ like a good idea, although I can see some ‘cons’. I’m happy i’ve read ‘the Communist Manifesto’ not just for the broader world view it’s given me, but also for the fact i have a new favourite word, ‘Bourgeoisie’.

So, because I managed to read ‘The Communist Manifesto’ during my work day, my evening was now free for my next read ‘The Pearl’ by John Steinbeck. This was on my longlist for the Popsugar Summer reading challenge but didn’t quite make it onto the shortlist as I wasn’t sure if a pearl was stretching the definition of ‘something you’d find at the beach’. I had it out anyway and it was a nice short book so I thought it would be good for the ‘outside of your house’ prompt as I don’t do well with heat, so hopefully wouldn’t be outside long. As it is, it absolutely tipped down with rain so no outside reading. Then I realised, I had read ‘The Communist Manifesto’ at work, it may be a stretch but I think that counts as ‘Outside of your house’ so I still earn the badge and ‘the Pearl’ counts towards my ‘read seven books’ badge.

Being a fan of Aesop’s Fables as a child, i like short tales with a moral. I won’t give too much away for those who haven’t read this yet, but i’d say there are many lessons that can be taken away from this book, depending on what aspect you look at.

As I was determined to catch up with myself I didn’t partake in any twitter Sprints, or Instagram Challenges, but I have of course earnt a few badges, so here are the stats.

Stats for Day 6 are:
Pages read: 198
Time spent Reading: 4hrs 10mins
Books Finished: 2

Challenge so far Stats:
Pages read: 1073
Time spent Reading: 19hrs 00mins
Books Finished: 6 (A Country to call Home, the Snows of Kilimanjaro, From Russia with love, Frankenstein, The Communist Manifesto, The Pearl)

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