Happy Wednesday everyone! Anyway, as the year moves forward, I hope that you are all doing well and are all healthy despite the health risks that continue to hound us. Things are starting to go back to normal although one should still throw caution in the air; the virus remains a threat. I hope that the pandemic will end soon. I am also praying that 2022 will be a year of hope, healing, and recovery for everyone. I hope that the rest of the year will be a great one.

It is time for another WWW Wednesday update as it is a Wednesday. WWW Wednesday is a bookish meme originally hosted by SAM@TAKING ON A WORLD OF WORDS. The mechanics for WWW Wednesday are 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?

For September, I have been reading books (except for one) in my active 2022 reading challenges. As the year transitioned to the -ber months, I have realized that I have been lagging behind in many of these challenges. As such, the rest of the year is dedicated to reading books from these reading challenges. At the start of the year, I listed books to be released this year that I am looking forward to. One of the ten books on this list is Sarah Manguso’s Very Cold People. I have never heard of her prior to 2022 nor have I read any of her works previously. Nevertheless, my curiosity was enough to convince me to add the book to my most anticipated reading list. However, I find the book rather flat. I am done with nearly a hundred pages but nothing much is happening. I know that the primary narrator is a girl and she was filling the story with different observations, from her parents to her classmates to her friends to mundane objects such as dolls. And yet, nothing is happening even though the book is a quick read. I still have a hundred pages to go so I am hoping that the story will pick up. Interestingly, this is Manguso’s debut novel.

What have you finished reading?

In the past week, I was able to finish just one book. This is primarily because of the book’s length. I did not expect that the font of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend would be that compact. It took me minutes to complete just one page. HAHA. So yes, The Little Friend was the only book I finished in the past week. It is my third novel written by Tartt that I read; I have now read all of her three novels. Tartt first captured my interest with her Pulitzer Prize-winning (and lengthier) book The Goldfinch. I next read her debut novel, The Secret History. I liked both books which made me look forward to her sophomore novel; I even included The Little Friend in my 2022 Top 22 Reading List. Unfortunately, I was underwhelmed by the book. It had several layers. It was a mystery novel that opened with the suicide of nine-year-old Robin. Years later, his younger sister Harriet was drawn into the idea that her older brother might not have taken his life, that he was murdered. With the help of her friend Hely, Harriet started investigating the circumstances surrounding her brother’s death. Instead, the story tailspins in a different direction as innocence clashes with the ugly realities of the adult world. The story was promising but it was ultimately plodded down by Tartt’s compunction for details. These details were neither helpful in understanding the story nor did they move the story forward

What will you read next?

I am planning to next read James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, a book that is part of both my 2022 Beat the Backlist Challenge and 2022 Top 22 Reading List. It has been five years since I acquired a copy of the book and after years of gathering dust on my bookshelf, I deem it the right time to immerse myself into this classic of American literature. I can’t recall when I first heard the book’s title. I think it was in high school when it was used as a sort of expression. Anyway, it stuck and I can’t believe I would encounter it years later, as a book.

Like Cooper, Emma Straub is a writer whose prose is unfamiliar to me. Like Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark, This Time Tomorrow was a book I encountered while researching for books to include on my 2022 Top 10 Books I Look Forward To List. It came in highly recommended, hence, its inclusion in my own list. Next up will be a very popular and familiar name. I have read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s other novels and I would be completing the set with The Beautiful and Damned, which is also the controversial writer’s sophomore novel.

That’s it for this week’s WWW Wednesday. I hope you are all doing great. Happy reading and always stay safe! Happy Wednesday again!

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