And it is Wednesday again, the first for the month of May. I hope everyone is having a great midweek. Mine is a bit tedious because of month end closing and the completion of statutory audit requirements. Nevertheless, I am wishing everyone a happy Wednesday! Wednesdays also mean WWW Wednesday update. WWW Wednesday is a bookish meme 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?
www-wednesdays
What are you currently reading?

After immersing in African Literature and Asian literature in March and April, respectively, my literary journey has next taken me to the Latin Americas and the Caribbean. As such, I find myself delving into the work of an unfamiliar author, by unfamiliar I mean an author whose work I have never read before. Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño is a name I kept encountering in must-read lists, his works among the most mentioned. However, it was only last year that I managed to snag copies of some of his works so what better way to commence my Latin American journey than with his most popular work, The Savage Detectives. The narrative is centered around a group of fledgling poets who refer to themselves as the visceral realists. I know there is some adventure brewing later in the narrative but I am still at the point where Bolaño is laying the setup for Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano.

What have you finished reading?

Korean writer Sohn Won-Pying’s Almond was the curtain drawer for my April Asian literature month. It was a title I was, to be honest, a little hesitant to read. First, it is the work of young adult fiction and I am really not fond of the genre. Second, it shot to fame after BTS’ Suga was seen reading a copy of the book in one episode of their reality show. After holding on purchasing the book, I finally decided to check out what it has in store. Almond is the story of Yunjae, a teenager suffering from an affliction called alexithymia. He was born with a smaller than normal amygdala, the almond-shaped section of the brain that is in charge of emotional responses. To cut it short, Yunjae is having trouble distinguishing between the different emotions. He is stoic (or maybe poker-faced) in front of circumstances requiring some deeper display of emotions. The theme made the novel interesting but again, it started to unravel on the last third and suddenly I feel like Sohn was undoing the progress she has made in the earlier sections of the novel.

What will you read next?

From one pillar of literature, I am next looking into a Nobel Laureate in Literature, with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores. This will be my fifth Garcia Marquez novel, making him my second most read Nobel Prize in Literature winner (after Ishiguro). It has been sometime since I last read any of his works (The Autumn of the Patriarch in 2018) and I can’t wait indulge in his body of art once again. It is also relatively shorter compared to The Savage Detectives. Following it up is another unfamiliar author. I literally have not heard nor encountered Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos before. I first encountered him through an online bookseller. It immediately piqued my interest so I “added it to my cart”. I think I am yet to read the work of a Paraguayan novelist.

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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