WWW Wednesday is a book meme run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

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

I’ve been aware of this for a while, and though I’m thinking I will post every other week rather than every week (I don’t feel I read fast enough for weekly), I thought it’d be fun to participate.

Currently Reading

I started reading Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King last week as a final side-story departure before finishing the Dark Tower series. I plan to read the entire thing, but my priority is getting through “Low Men in Yellow Coats”, since Ted Brautigan is apparently an important character related to the Tower. As a story that’s part of this collection I do find it a little strange just how tied to Dark Tower it is, since as I understand it this book is mainly about capturing the attitudes of 1960s America, especially in relation to the Vietnam War. The family drama is good nonetheless, and King does a fine job of telling the story believably from the perspective of a young boy.

I’m still in the middle of Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris, which I treat as something a little more supplementary to what I’m mainly focusing on reading. I’m enjoying it a lot so far, it’s quite funny, though I liked When You Are Engulfed in Flames more thus far. The essays are good, but the short monologues he was inspired to write by the “Forensics” that high school students dictate haven’t done much for me yet.

Recently Finished

The most recent book I finished reading was Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, the second Philip Marlowe detective novel. The hardboiled attitudes and narrative style was fun, especially the period specific dialogue and exaggerated manner some characters are presented — the loudly-dressed ex-con Moose Malloy being my favourite. It was a strange odyssey through a criminal underworld that Marlowe, despite his intelligence and capabilities, seemed to stumble along through more than deduce and break down on his own. In this way it felt very anti-detective fiction, until the ending which wraps things up conveniently for the reader. The mystery kept me interested nonetheless, though it did drag a bit towards the end, where I started to feel a little tangled in all its threads.

Reading Next

I’ve got several books in mind for reading in the near future, some of them prose and others graphic novels. I want to finally start The Dark Tower (VII) so I can say I’ve finished the series. I’m dying to know how it all ends, especially with the cliffhanger Song of Susannah left me on. I also want to start reading more current books, so I picked up Homesick for Another World, a collection of short stories by Ottessa Moshfegh. I read a little bit of a preview before buying to see if I like her style, but otherwise I want to go in blind.

I’m waiting for a copy of Hellboy: The Crooked Man and Others to arrive so I can finish reading Hellboy. I have all 12 volumes except for the above one (Vol. 10) which has been harder to find, so it’s run my progress on the series into the ground. I’ve been loving it though and can’t wait to finally power through the rest. In the meantime, I’m going to start reading Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman and J. H. Williams III, which I’m disappointed I haven’t done already considering how much I love the original Sandman series.