No intro today, let’s just get to business:
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?
 |
 |
| Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky |
Battle Ground by Jim Butcher, read by James Marsters |
I’ve barely scratched the surface of Tchaikovsky’s book, but am eager to get going deeper.
Well, I remember why Butcher is officially dead to me. Which is not to suggest that I’m not casting aside eerything else that I’m doing when the Twelve Months comes out next week. But I’m not sure I’ll forgive him for one of the events of this book.
What did you recently finish reading?
 |
 |
| The Hunted by Steven Max Russo |
Peace Talks by Jim Butcher, read by James Marsters |
You can always count on Russo for a rousing Thriller–great story.
Just couldn’t shake the sense of impending doom with Peace Talks (and just wished Dresden took two opportunities to just talk to people and spare himself a lot of grief).
What do you think you’ll read next?
 |
 |
| Lit by Tim Sandlin |
Everyone in the Group Chat Dies by L.M. Chilton, read by Kimberly Capero |
champing at the bit to get at it since I first read about it last Fall.
I liked Chilton’s Swiped, and wonder what she does with this Thriller about a “TikTok true crime investigator, a ’90s serial killer that may not be as dead as everyone would like, a text thread from hell, and long buried secrets that just won’t stay in the grave where they belong.”
What’s on your nightstands/side tables/eReader/etc.?
allysonyj
Starting off my Goodreads Challenge having finished three books so far (well, actually one was a DNF, but it counts.)
Picked up “The 4 Queens of Crime” by Rosanne Limoncelli, thinking it was “The Queens of Crime” by Marie Benedict. I had read a review but hadn’t paid attention to the author; when I saw Benedict’s book on the New Releases shelf at a different library I realized my error. Both books have the same trope – well-regarded woman fiction writers in the 1930’s (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Marjorie Allenby,+ in Benedict’s book, the countess Orzky) team up to solve a real murder.
The Limoncelli version was a nice cozy mystery with the murder taking place in the required country house. The Marie Benedict version was a feminist tract with a fictional mystery veneer – I got tired of the fictional women feeling sorry for themselves because they were being disregarded or patronized by the men, and Did Not Finish.
A surprise pleasure was “The Frozen River” by Ariel Lawhun. It was everything Benedict’s book should have been, focused on a real historical figure (Martha Ballard, a midwife in post-revolutionary-war Maine) and making its point about women being undervalued without constant jabs. The mystery here involved a corpse floating in a freezing river and the resolution was a bit murky as far as explaining why the corpse was in the river and why he was taken out, but the intervening depiction of the society of a small community on the banks of the Kennebec River, with all the tensions of a small town, leftover hostilities from the War, the hazards of midwifery, and the challenges of the Long Winter of 1789 make this a real page-turner. (Note: This is one of the COLDEST books I’ve ever read – dress warm while reading!)
Currently reading “White Cat, Black Dog” by Kelly Link, a collection of eerie short stories based on traditional fairy tales. I liked the first story, “The White Cat’s Divorce” but got tired of the half-fantasy mode in the following stories. Probably will be another DNF, as the last story, “Skinders’ Veil”, has too many echoes of Steven King and a protagonist who you know is going to go down into that basement.
Also reading “Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement” essays by prisoners and others edited by a friend, Terry Kupers.
Most surprisingly, reading “The Chinese Typewriter” by Thomas Mullaney, a scholarly work about an arcane subject, but the Acknowledgements and Introduction are so downright beautifully written I expect to savor every page.
HCNewton
WOW. That’s…a lot. I don’t see how you can keep that all straight!