WWW Wednesday 13 – February – 2019

Boy, it’s been a bit – so I decided to jump in on WWW Wednesday this month and catch up with one of my favorite past times.

Reading!

The Three W’s for WWW Wednesday are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

What are you currently reading?

 

Right now, I am a couple of chapters in The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra.  Having read (and loved) A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by the same author I was excited to read this one and got if for Christmas.  From Goodreads:

This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking.  In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work.

 

 

What did you recently finish reading?

First, I finished Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford.   I really enjoyed this book. We follow Frank Bascombe at age 68 and retired and as he travels through his days, we read his thoughts about being in, what he calls, his Next Level of life.

I found myself smiling reading through his passages.  I felt like he could do a stand up comedy routine discussing his thoughts on aging, a new fear of falling, a new fear of smelling (“Sally assures me I don’t, that she’d give me “the signal.”  But if the machine is winding down, its parts start to fester.”)

Overall, very enjoyable.

 

 

Then, I read it – the one I feared was going to stab me in the heart based on the cover alone – A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.

Guess what?  It did.  This book took me an entire month to read.  Yes, it was long – well over 800 pages.  But more than that – the subject was just HARD to read.

You might think this book is about four friends as advertised.  But midway through the book, you realize the book is about one of the friends, Jude, in particular.  And although there is a part in the book he references as “the happy years” the rest of his years are nothing but torment.  As hard as it was, I should mention I did really like the book.

From Goodreads: “(Jude is a) broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.”

After that, I went for something lighter – who wouldn’t?  And chose So Big by Edna Ferber.  I really enjoyed this book.  Written in 1924, the book evolved – beginning with the new life of one young woman having to start on her own at a very young age and followed the change not only in her life from a young socialite to a farm wife, but in the city of Chicago and her son.

A quote from the book, “For equipment she had youth, curiosity, a steel strong frame…four hundred ninety-seven dollars; and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps, painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”

Then I read The Shadow of the Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto, which I also really enjoyed.  From Goodreads:

“Fatima Bhutto’s stunning debut begins and ends one rain swept Friday morning in Mir Ali, a small town in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas close to the Afghan border. This land is also home to a three-dimensional chessboard of seemingly endless war.  The Shadow of the Crescent Moon chronicles the lives of five young people trying to live and love in a world on fire. Individuals are pushed to make terrible choices. And, as the events of this single morning unfold, one woman is at the centre of it all.”

 

 

 

Then I read This is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel – which as I posted before – really enjoyed as a parent and for the story itself.  From Goodreads:

This Is How It Always Is is a novel about revelations, transformations, fairy tales, and family. And it’s about the ways this is how it always is: Change is always hard and miraculous and hard again, parenting is always a leap into the unknown with crossed fingers and full hearts, children grow but not always according to plan. And families with secrets don’t get to keep them forever.

 

 

What do you think you’ll read next?

To be honest, I don’t know yet.  I am in the happy time of year in that I have a pile of books received at Christmas – so the picking is good!  I’ll keep you posted!

Thanks again Sam and Elizabeth for hosting WWW Wednesday!