Happy Wednesday everyone! 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?

Welcome to the first Wednesday of November. How time flies! We are now down to the last two months of the year. It seems like a lot has happened in the past ten months, but at the same time, nothing much has happened. Nevertheless, I hope that the year has been kind to everyone. I hope everyone has completed their goals or is on the way to achieving them. I hope that everyone gets repaid for their hard work. I hope the remainder of the year will shower everyone with blessings and good news. As I approach the final stretch of the year, my focus, reading-wise, has shifted to the remaining books in my reading challenges. Well, I guess this is nothing new. I have always scrambled toward the end of the year. Anyway, my current read is part of my 2024 Top 24 Reading List, the twenty-second book from the list. It was during the pandemic that I first encountered Mozambican writer Mia Couto.

Apparently, he is quite a highly-heralded writer, with an oeuvre that spans novels, poetry, and short stories. He was also awarded the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014 and the Camões Prize in 2013, the most important literary award in the Portuguese language. This is among the reasons why I included his novel Woman of the Ashes in my 2024 Top 24 Reading List. Originally published in 2018, the novel commences in 1894 when 15-year-old Imani’s village of Nkokolani finds itself stuck between two looming powers: one side is comprised of different ethnic groups, led by the terrifying emperor Ngungunyane and the other are the Portuguese, whose king Dom Carlos sends various emissaries, of which the latest is Sergeant Germano de Melo. I just started reading the book but I am already looking forward to how the story unfolds. I am also excited to read about a part of history I have not read about before.  

What have you finished reading?

Without design, it has become part of my goal this year to read all six books shortlisted for the Booker Prize. All six writers on the shortlist were writers whose oeuvres I have not explored before and, except Percival Everett, writers who I have encountered for the first time. With Samantha Harvey’s Orbital completing the circle, this is just the second time that I completed all Booker Prize-shortlisted books before the announcement of the winner; the first time was in 2021, won by Damon Galgut’s The Promise. I am looking forward to who will be awarded on November 12.

Harvey, I learned, is quite a highly-regarded British writer. Her debut novel, The Wilderness (2009) was longlisted for the Booker Prize while The Western Wind (2018) was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Anyway, Orbital transports us to outer space – I guess the title and the cover were dead giveaways – to the International Space Station manned by four astronauts and two cosmonauts, four men and two women. The novel charted a day in their life. Harvey paints their daily routine; it is cyclical and mundane but they have gotten used to the thrum of routine. They were still enthusiastic about their vocation. Outside, the view is captivating, except perhaps for the dark void. Below, life on Earth was still taking place. From the space station, the astronauts were provided a new vantage point from which to observe the Earth. This makes it ripe for introspection where science and real life intersect. We read about the typhoon looming to inundate the Philippines and Indonesia. Upon observing this, Nell, an English astronaut, recalls the time he spent deep-sea diving in the Philippines. Climate change was one of a range of various subjects examined in the story, along with the characters’ backstories. However, I feel like the story never reached its full potential. There was a lot of promise but Harvey didn’t fully build on the foundations she established. Still, Orbital was an interesting read that provides a different perspective.

After completing all Booker Prize-shortlisted books, I turned my attention to one of this year’s most looked forward books, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. Rooney shot into the literary scene in 2017 with her debut novel, Conversations with Friends. However, it was through the Irish writer’s sophomore novel, Normal People, that I first came across her. The book was part of my 2019 Top 10 Books I Look Forward To List. I must say I was dampened by the book although I was impressed by the writing. In terms of writing, the Irish rarely disappoints me. It was the writing alone that made me want to read her succeeding books. This then brings me to Intermezzo.

Intermezzo, in a nutshell, was the story of brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek. When the story commenced, they were both coping with the recent demise of their father. Their father was a Slovak migrant who moved to Ireland in the 1980s. Following their mother’s abandonment when they were younger, it was their father who raised them. However, the brothers were distant from each other, owing to the huge age gap; they were born almost a decade apart. Peter, in his mid-thirties, was a successful lawyer, a stark dichotomy to the struggling Ivan, a chess prodigy who was trying to make ends meet. However, there was more story to their detachment from each other’s lives. As the story unfolds, we get to learn why and how things turned the way they were in the present. On top of their flimsy relationship, we also read about their romantic affairs. Peter was in a relationship with college student Naomi although he was trying to get back with Sylvia, his long-time lover who broke up with him following an accident a couple of years before. On the other hand, Ivan fell in love with Margaret, a woman older than her brother he met while participating in a chess exhibition in the countryside. While Rooney’s earlier works were marketed as “millennial” novels, Intermezzo is more profound as it examines grief, loss, the intricacies of relationships and families, and even, on a subtler level, generational gaps. Like her other works, however, a moment of catharsis toward the end of the story provides clarity and ties all the novel’s loose ends together. I must say I find this more moving than Normal People or Beautiful World, Where Are You.

What will you read next?