It’s days like this that make me so glad to be a bookworm/bookwyrm/ink drinker and not someone who enjoys spending time outside—as I post this, it’s 107° F. No thank you. I’d be like one of those guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
This meme was formerly hosted by MizB at A Daily Rhythm and revived on Taking on a World of Words—and shown to me by Aurore-Anne-Chehoke at Diary-of-a-black-city-girl.
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
Seems easy enough, right? Let’s take a peek at this week’s answers:
What are you currently reading?
I’m reading Steam Opera by James T. Lambert, which is the least steampunk-ish steampunk novel I’ve ever read (at the 30% or so mark) and is also the best thing that Lambert has done to date, so what do I care? I’m listening to Storm Front by Jim Butcher, read by James Marsters on audiobook, because it’s been too long since I spent time with Harry.
What did you recently finish reading?
I just finished Jordan Harper’s The Last King of California and Breaking the Dark by Lisa Jewell, read by Helen Laser on audio.
What do you think you’ll read next?
My next book should be for The Camelot Shadow by Sean Gibson and my next audiobook should be Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke, read by MacLeod Andrews, Neil Shah, Dani Martineck, Sophie Amoss, Neil Hellegers, Cary Hite, Sean Patrick Hopkins, Joshua Kane, Amy Landon, Nicole Lewis, Brittany Pressley and Jonathan Todd Ross (which is a lot of people for 208 minutes).
Are you “beating the heat” (or at least avoiding it) with anything fun and/or good and/or compelling?
Carol
🥵🥵🥵
Bookstooge
And I thought 102 was bad!
HCNewton
Oh, 102 is bad. Just slightly (not necessarily noticeably) better.
allysonyj
I pledged last week that I was not going to read anything on my TBR or any lucky finds from the book cart until I had actually finished a couple of books that had been in process for a while. Here we go:
I finished Maggie O’Farrell’s “The Marriage Portrait”, another go at turning Robert Browning’s famous poem “My Last Duchess” into a novel. O’Farrell is working hard to live up to her literary success with “Hamnet”, but this goes over the edge of literary into pretentiousness. Gabrielle Krimm’s “His Last Duchess” on the same base is an unabashed historical romance, and much more fun to read.
I re-read Tony Hillerman’s “Sacred Clowns” as a choice of my book group, ended up hosting the discussion. Multicultural, full of humanity, and gorgeous landscape writing. Like most of Hillerman. What’s not to like?
I finished Patric Gagne’s “Sociopath: A Memoir”. This is a truly excellent discussion of the mental mis-wiring that leads to the condition we label “sociopath” but should probably be called something like “nonopath.” I’ve been talking about this book to folks quite a bit.
OK, that took care of a bit of the backlog, so I plunged into a bit of fluff: “Heiress Apparent” by Diana Ma. This YA novel hits all my hot buttons: 1) a young Chinese American 2) getting her big break in movies 3) going to Beijing for the movie shoot 4) finding her doppelganger and 5) uncovering multi-generational family secrets. How could I resist! And it was a pretty good story, if you left out the 6) incredibly hot Chinese love interest, which bogged things down for me, (but maybe not for the YA audience it was aimed at.)
A friend recommended A. S. Byatt’s “Djinn in the Eye of the NIghtingale” a collection of “fairy stories”. If Neil Gaiman were a woman, he might have written these. Great modern fantasy.
And from the book cart I picked up “Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind” by Ann B. Ross, a lively fun read in the tradition of “Fried Green Tomatoes in the Whistle Stop Cafe.” If you like stories about feisty widder wimmin embattled against redneck patriarchal preachermen with a chorus of neighborhood gossips, you’ll get a kick out of this one.
Also from the book cart: Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift from the Sea”, a series of essays about women and their place in life which was very popular in the 1950’s, and not nearly as dated 70 years later as it ought to be.
Still reading at “Mallowan’s Memoirs” (I’ve gotten to the Agatha Christie part, which moves faster). I picked up Vikam Seth’s “An Equal Music” just to remind myself what it was about and couldn’t put it down. And there’s a collection of short stories called “Even Deadlier” put together by the Great Books folks as a sequel to “The 7 Deadly Sins” – I’m up to Sloth.
Next – again, I’d better finish a couple of the above, and there’s always the book cart.