People to read with

In a sense, other people keep me reading.

I've alluded before to the face2face reading group that I belong to. It is a group of about 7 teachers, all female, and the core of us have been meeting for (we think) about 16 years. We basically only read crime fiction, meet about once a month on a Sunday morning at a coffee shop. We have a roster and someone is delegated to choose the book for the next month. Usually the book is something recently published but also readily obtainable.
We don't usually discuss the book very thoroughly but we do comment on what we liked or disliked about it. Nor do we all always get the book read. But we share what we are reading, bring along books that we've read for others to borrow etc. We are meeting tomorrow morning, so there'll be a new book to hunt down.
If you work out that perhaps we have met for 10 or 11 times a year for 16 years, we've shared a minimum of 176 books together - that is a fair number!
We had the pleasure last year of launching Michael Robotham's NIGHT FERRY for the Big Book Club here in South Australia. We got free copies of the book, and our pictures in Adelaide Advertiser. Our group was also named Reading Group of the Month in the Good Reading in May 2006.

Other people I read with are the online groups that I belong to.
In general they are Yahoo groups: oz_mystery readers, 4MA, Murder & Mayhem, Mystery Readers Cafe, and Brit-Aussie. They all have their methods of getting people to share what they read and I am primarily active in oz_mystery_readers which I founded, and 4MA which I have belonged to for about 6 years.

Another thing that gets me reading is that I review one or two books a month for Random House Australia. That keeps a steady stream of books coming my way. My reviews for these are always published on Reviewers Choice.

And I've discovered at least 3 people at work who share similar tastes, so we occasionally pass books on to one another to.

And it has occurred to me now that I have acquired a lot of other people I read with, through the blogs I monitor, and blogging groups I have joined like The Sunday Salon.

So really, I read with dozens of people. Their finds and comments keep me going