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

For the time being, A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris is still shelved.

I’m still in the midst of Pet Sematary by Stephen King. I’m a little bummed out that I likely won’t even have it finished before Halloween, but I’m also kind of just accepting that. Work has been a lot busier the last couple of months, and I’ve been hit with a few life events, so I’m actually managing to cut myself some slack, at least for now. I was surprised to find that the death of Gage is something that has already happened once we learn about it. It isn’t an event that unfolds in real time in the narrative. I think this was interestingly done, as we still learn much of how it went down, but from Louis’s pained recollection of it. It reads like remembering a real traumatic event, where your memories treat it like it happened to somebody else.

I also managed to start reading The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, a work of weird fiction from the late 19th century. So far, I’m a little disappointed to find that the author has some distasteful views that he’s injected into the text from the get-go. I’m not really shocked by it or anything, it’s just disappointing that this genre seems to have authors that cannot help but espouse their views to such a degree. Just tell me the story about the play that drives people nuts, I don’t care about your vision of 1920s America and what has been done to what minority groups to accommodate this vision. Uncanny that he predicts a war with Germany having been a big historical event, though, considering this was published in 1895. I’ve not gotten far enough into this to comment on anything else. The prose is better than Lovecraft so far, at least.

Recently Finished

Last night I read through the entirety of Black Paradox by Junji Ito, the latest book of his published in North America by VIZ. Turns out this book was originally published in 2009, so my suspicions that this was much newer were actually unfounded; I’d just never heard of this book before. All in all, it was pretty good. The book definitely had its spookier moments and disturbing imagery, but it is more of a weird thriller than a horror book. Based on the first chapter, I was a little worried that it would be too all over the place, but it quickly found its footing. I won’t spoil how things play out, but I must say that this book about four people who decide to carry out a suicide pact together did not at all go the way I was expecting.

Reading Next

It would seem that most of my hopefuls for October won’t be happening this month, though it’s not that surprising. I won’t harp on that further. In any case, I have yet another graphic novel I want to check out before Halloween. It’ll be November by the next WWW post, but we’ve still got some time until the 31st, so I’m confident I can make time for it. The graphic novel in question is Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët. I’ve already read the prologue, just to give it a quick glance, and there is a beautiful contrast between the art style and characters and the content, considering I see that a bunch of cute, pixie-like people seem to be living in the corpse of a little girl lying in a field. I’m eager to dig into the story further.

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