WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!

The Three Ws are:

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

Currently Reading

Ended up taking a weird hiatus these past few weeks, as I’ve ended up not posting a single thing since July 31st. Initially, I just skipped the first Wednesday of August because I wanted more to show for it, but now I’ve nearly missed three in a row. In this time I’ve read a fair amount, though regrettably I’m still making my way through Authority by Jeff VanderMeer. Partly, this is because I decided to shift my focus other places; I still think I can get this book done before the end of the month. However, I am finding the book a little too slow, despite the fact that I do in fact like it a lot. Some things are unraveling and being revealed at the point in the story I’m at, but I still feel a little at a loss as to what it’s all building toward and what’s at stake. There are also some narrative devices that I’m not 100% sold on, but I think I can come around on them. We’ll see. I’m being vague because I don’t want to spoil things too much, even though this book is 10 years old now.

Recently Finished

I’ve actually finished quite a lot in the intervening time, which I’m happy about, most of them being comics. They’re library books rather than from my personal backlog, so I’m sorry to say I still haven’t gotten to some of those, but I’m still pleased with the results anyway. Over the past few weeks I’ve read two more volumes from the Jim Henson’s The Storyteller series of anthologies: Fairies and Sirens. I really liked the Fairies volume, the writers have a greater wealth of folklore from around the world to pull from, as you can be very broad when considering something as related to fairies. Sirens, on the other hand, was a bit weaker. The stories were just not as interesting, though not poorly illustrated or written, and as a theme it just felt a little more tenuous. One of them is about a goddess from China that’s half snake, which barely counts, while none of them include sirens from actual Greek mythology.

What I mainly shifted my focus toward was getting Dead Mountain by Donnie Eichar done in time to get it back to the library, as somebody else had put a hold on it. I don’t know if I’ll be reviewing this one, but I will say here that I really loved this book. I have trouble with nonfiction sometimes, but Eichar did a really great job presenting this story and tying it together with his own experiences before bringing it all together with a satisfying theory about what actually happened on that mountain that fateful night that resulted in nine hikers fleeing the safety of their tent into the freezing dead of night, leading to their deaths from exposure. Where before my familiarity with this mystery was based on a lot of hearsay and sensationalism, I’ve come away from this book with a much deeper understanding of what took place leading up to the incident, the aftermath, and a likely explanation of what could actually have happened. Highly recommend this one to lovers of nonfiction.

Reading Next

I’m still going to be working away at Authority for the next couple of weeks, but I’ve also taken a new book out of the library: Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments by Sappho. As I understand it, the book collects translations of all the surviving work of the Greek poet Sappho. I try to push myself to read poetry from time to time, and while I’ve bristled a little with modern stuff, I’ve always wanted to give her work a closer look, so I was happy to discover that the library has a volume that can satisfy that curiosity. I’ve got a number of novels in mind that I want to read next, but I haven’t settled on one yet. There’s a number I still want to read this year that I’m realizing I likely won’t get to, which is disappointing. So it goes.

Until next time, thank you for reading! Feel free to share your own post down below.