It’s midweek again! That means one thing, a WWW Wednesday update! WWW Wednesday is a bookish meme was originally hosted by SAM@TAKING ON A WORLD OF WORDS. The mechanics for WWW Wednesday is quite simple. You just have to answer three questions:

  1. What are you currently reading?
  2. What have you finished reading?
  3. What will you read next?

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What are you currently reading?

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So, I’ve basically escaped from reality and returned to Middle Earth in the hopes that there won’t be a pandemic there. Haha. Oh well, reading is a form of escapist art too. So yes, my current read is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Everyone is familiar with Tolkien because of his The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and The Hobbit. I’ve read these four books about three or four years ago so The Silmarillion is a welcome change of environment. Online his other works, The Silmarillion is not heavily laden in action or adventure. It still has them in spades but there is a great deviation in terms of the writing style. Reading the book is akin to reading a history book. Not that I am complaining though, considering that it is an easier read and Tolkien’s world-building remains incredible. I just started the book two days ago and I am nearly done!

P.S. Yesterday night, I just discovered that the copy of the book I have comes with a map of Middle Earth. It helped me map out the movement of the protagonists and their adventures.

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What have you finished reading?

My first completed book for the month of August is Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. As I have mentioned in my previous WWW Wednesday post, this is my first immersion in a Dickensian tale in nearly a decade. It relates the story of Esther Summerson who gets caught up in a whirlwind of legal battles, wills, romances and a whole lot of different things. It is classic Dickens but with a bevy of subplots which pervaded the main story line. I have two grievances with the book – it has too many subplots and it dragged longer than it should have. Maybe the novel’s pace is an indirect allegory to how the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case progressed – at snail pace.

From one literary classic to another. I always thought Perfume, The Story of a Murderer was written and published in the 18th or 19th century. Who’d have thought it was published in the late 20th century. LOL. It is actually one of the books that I have been looking forward to for years. Written by German writer Patrick Suskind, it relates the story of Jean Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan born in 18th century Paris. The story’s premise is quirky, bordering on the eccentric. Contrary to expectations, the novel touched more on Grenouille’s growth. It was an eerie experience to say the least.

What will you read next?

I am shelving Peter Nadas’ Parallel Stories for the meantime. I just realized that The Silmarillion is my 770th read and as someone who places special meanings to numbers, I am allotting a good number for Parallel Stories, either 800, 7775 or 780. 800 seems too tall a task to achieve this year so 780 or 775 sounds more like a realistic number.

In this regard, I am replacing Parallel Stories with Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise and Art Spiegelman’s Maus next. Both deals about the Second World War and both are part of my 2020 Top 20 Reading List, which most of the books mentioned in this WWW update is part of. I am looking forward to these two tales. And yes, Maus is a graphic novel. It is going to be my second one after Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. 

And thus concludes another WWW Wednesday update! I hope everyone is having a great midweek! Do keep safe and as always, enjoy reading

 

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