Happy Wednesday everyone! How has your year been so far? I hope that it has been great. I also hope and pray that the rest of the year will be brimming with good news, positive energy, and blessings. I also hope that everyone will be happy and healthy, in body, mind, and spirit.

Wednesdays also mean WWW Wednesday updates. WWW Wednesday is a bookish meme hosted originally 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?

We are currently in the last stretch of March. How time flies! To commemorate Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day on March 8, I resolved to read works by female writers this month. I think the last time I hosted this was back in March 2022. This journey has brought me across the world, well, except perhaps Europe and Africa. Nevertheless, my current read, Joyce Carol Oates’ them has transported me to North America. This is my first novel by the prolific American writer; I obtained a copy of the book during the 2018 Big Bad Wolf Sale. It was for this reason that I added the book to my 2024 Beat the Backlist Challenge. It is also part of my 2024 Top 24 Reading List. This makes it the first and seventh book, respectively, from the said reading challenges.

Winner of the Nationa Book Award, them is the third of thematically interconnected novels collectively referred to as the Wonderland Quartet. Set in Detroit, the novel charts the fortunes of three main characters: Loretta and her children Jules and Maureen. Jules was Loretta’s only son and the eldest of the siblings. His father was fatally shot by Brock, Loretta’s brother. Meanwhile, Maureen and her sister Betty were Loretta’s children with Howard Wendall, a cop. We then read about their individual journeys. Jules was skirting danger as he got involved with petty theft. Things went more awry when Howard died and Loretta remarried. To run the household, Loretta relied on Maureen who, in turn, yearned for escape. There are several layers to the story but it was palpable how the characters were all yearning to capture that American dream. I am halfway through the book so I am expecting more

What have you finished reading?

The past week has not been as productive as the previous week, reading-wise that is. This is mainly because the book I read is over 800 pages long. At 832 pages, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries is my second longest read this year, eclipsed only by Stephen Markley’s The Deluge. Like them, The Luminaries is part of my 2024 Top 24 Reading List although it could have also been part of my 2024 Beat the Backlist Challenge considering that I obtained a copy of the book way back in late 2019. As has been the case for most of my books, both books were left to gather dust on my bookshelf.

Anyway, The Luminaries is the second Booker Prize-winning book I read this year after Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, the 2023 winner; The Luminaries won the prestigious award back in 2013. A work of historical fiction The Luminaries is set in 19th-century New Zealand and commenced with the arrival of Walter Moody in Hokitika. At the smoking room of the Crown Hotel, he stumbled upon a clandestine meeting between twelve men who were discussing a series of mysterious and troubling events that recently swept the town. It all started with the mysterious death of the local town hermit, Crosbie Wells, on January 14, 13 days before Moody arrived in Hokitika.  It was initially reported that Wells died peacefully. However, like various pieces of a puzzle, different pieces of evidence found at Wells’ home pointed otherwise. This was exacerbated by the disappearance of Emery Staines, a rich and likable young man, and the discovery of an unconscious Anna Wetherell, a prostitute, on the road all on the same day Wells was discovered by a politician named Alistair Lauderback. Catton then enthralls the readers with a rollercoaster ride that pulls the readers in all directions. But will the mystery ever be solved as each of the twelve men had different accounts of what happened the night that Wells died? Overall, The Luminaries is a multifaceted novel that reeled me in from the onset.

What will you read next?