WWW Wednesday – February 8, 2023

February 8, 2023 Ryan1 Comment

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

Wolf in White Van I did not end up posting last week because, due to a deeply unfortunate turn of events that came out of nowhere, I literally did zero reading. Utterly scandalous. So, there didn’t seem to be a point to putting one of these up since nothing had changed. Fortunately for this week, I did manage to read some more of Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle, though I’m still got a bit to go despite how short the novel is. More and more details around the tragic incident with some of the players of Sean’s game are slowly being unearthed, and I’m starting to wonder if he isn’t something of an unreliable narrator. I suppose that shouldn’t come as a surprise, all things considered, but if the story goes in the direction I think it’s going in I believe I will be unhappy with the outcome. We shall see.

Recently Finished

Nothing this week! I am ashamed; I have not been reading comics like I’ve meant to. This could easily change at any time, but look at how that’s worked for me so far.

Reading Next

Paper Girls 3 The books I want to read next haven’t really changed, so maybe we’ll be seeing some Paper Girls or Manga Diary of a Male Porn Star or even some Springfield Confidential in the near future. The possibilities are limited and specific. I should have some time this weekend, so let’s just commit to Paper Girls volume three right now, shall we? I’ll eat my glasses if I don’t. Also, I’m not too sure about Springfield Confidential, to be honest. I definitely want to read it soon, but I’m still feeling in the mood for fiction, so I might try to juggle it with something else. What that something else will actually be I cannot say at this time, but I do have a few things in mind.

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

WWW Wednesday – January 25, 2023

January 25, 2023January 25, 2023 RyanLeave a comment

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

I was hoping I’d have made more progress with Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle since last week, but work comes first, so I did not end up having as much reading time as I was anticipating. Still, I have made some decent progress and have a better picture of what this whole story is all about. It’s made clear from early on that the main character, Sean, is facing some legal trouble related to the pen-and-paper role-playing game he operates for people via the mail, and up until the point I have reached, the details of the tragedy leading to his legal troubles have been slowly elucidated. It’s painting an interesting picture of how a disfigured loner has found a way to form his own little sense of community and the baffling yet believable misunderstanding that led to the tragedy which puts an unfortunate spotlight on him. With so much of that case uncovered already, I’m curious to see what details are yet to be revealed or if there is a turn in store for Sean.

Recently Finished

Nothing this week!

Reading Next

I’m still not anticipating that I will have another book in my hands by this time next week, since I should be more realistic about my time, but I do intend to read more comics by next week if I can. Of course, I really want to keep myself going on Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang with the third volume, but I would also really like to read volume two of Manga Diary of a Male Porn Star by Kaeruno Erefante, which I intended to read back in December but never actually made time for. Despite the length of time since volume one, this is at least not a narrative-heavy series, so it will be easy enough to jump right back into it.

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

WWW Wednesday – January 18, 2023

January 18, 2023January 19, 2023 Ryan1 Comment

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

Finally I’m posting one of these in 2023 (albeit quite late in the day). I have started reading something new this year, Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle, though I’ve only just read the first chapter, so I haven’t gotten far enough to have any substantial impressions to share about it. So far, I’ve gotten a vague understanding of the state of mind the main character exists in and impressions on life-changing bodily harm he inflicted upon himself. With luck, I’m hoping to make some good progress on it by next week. I enjoyed Universal Harvester well enough, which was the last Darnielle novel that I read, but a lasting impression is that it didn’t quite meet my expectations either. With virtually no expectations for this book, I’m hoping for a better result by the end.

Recently Finished

Finally, I finished reading A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris. This book was the reason I hadn’t posted one of these yet in the new year; I just really didn’t want to be banging the same drum about having to finish this book. That being said, I really enjoyed the reading experience. I believe I had been doing it a disservice by initially going at it slowly. All things considered, 400 or so pages really blew by, and his perspective on the world was enjoyable to behold, exploring subjects humorous, mundane, and poignant. What became most surreal about this book was how familiar the events he comments on were as the years became more and more recent. It’s a bit unnerving to see 17 years condensed in such a way on its own, but the emergence of the pandemic and other huge political issues of the last 6 or so years was a stark reminder of how candid these diaries are.

Paper Girls 2 I also read the second volume of Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughn, finally. I really wish I had read this closer to the first volume, as I’m still having a bit of trouble keeping track of who is who among some of the main cast, though only with a couple of the characters. I’m honestly a little tempted to go back and read it again, just so I can appreciate it a little better. I’m not sure what it was, but something clicked for me with this volume and now I’m into it in a way that I wasn’t after finishing the first volume, so that’s nice. I’m really enjoying the idea that this story’s time travel doesn’t allow for branching timelines, so I’m curious as to what the capabilities and constraints are under this system. Can things be changed or is everything set in stone, it’s only a matter of the order we’re seeing things happen in? I have the third volume already, so I’ll hopefully be reading that soon.

Reading Next

With my focus being on getting into Wolf in White Van right now, I haven’t really decided what I definitely want to read next, but I do know that Springfield Confidential by Mike Reiss is still of great interest to me, so I may be reading that in the near future. I’m trying not to stress reading specific books too much though, so we’ll see where whims take me.

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

WWW Wednesday – December 28, 2022

December 28, 2022 Ryan1 Comment

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

A Carnival of Snackery Last week I was absent from making one of these posts, as I was celebrating an early Christmas out of town with my family, though I don’t believe I had made much progress on anything to have had much to say anyway. Fortunately, I have finally been making some progress in A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris. I really have been remiss in letting this book sit for so long, because I am reminded upon picking it up just how much I enjoy his writing, even just these bite-sized diary entries. Based on certain entries, it seems like he’s an author who would be really fun to see at a meet and greet, though I feel like I would succumb to the self-imposed pressure of wanting to have something interesting to say or talk about briefly with him. Hopefully, I can finish this book by the end of the year, but seeing as that is on Sunday, I have my work cut out for me. I’ve made progress, but I still have several hundred pages left.

Recently Finished

Nothing this week, since I was busy visiting family last week and I’ve actually been busier than you might expect with work this past week. I’m hoping I can fit in some short stuff alongside A Carnival of Snackery, but we’ll see.

Reading Next

Anything I’m going to read next I have talked about already. Right now, though, so long as I haven’t started them yet, I’m happy to let them wait until the New Year. What’s really going to bug me is if I don’t finish what I’m currently reading, so that’s going to take priority.

I hope everybody has a fun and safe New Year’s weekend. My inhuman work schedule still has me working, despite it landing on a Saturday this year, but I will try to make merry in my own time.

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

WWW Wednesday – December 14, 2022

December 14, 2022 RyanLeave a comment

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

Nothing to update here this week.

Recently Finished

A couple of days ago I managed to finish reading Tracking the Chupacabra by Benjamin Radford. It feels weird that it took me as long as it did, since it’s not even 200 pages long with all said and done. I think perhaps the font size and number of words per page makes it appear deceptively short. At any rate, I really like this book, but I would say my experience with it was just good not great. It was well written and well researched, but what stood out most to me was that I am perhaps not the target audience for something like this; it was more or less preaching to the choir the entire time. I needed no persuading, it was not a topic I was even agnostic about. Still, it made for an interesting read and I’m glad I did it.

Reading Next

It is becoming more and more apparent to me that I will probably not be reading another full book this month, other than A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris, if I can manage to actually pick the damn thing back up again. Nevertheless, I have some comics I’d like to get through to get myself to a certain point in my Goodreads challenge, even if I’m far from my goal of 50 books overall. I’ve just been able to borrow a copy of the second volume of Manga Diary of a Male Porn Star by Kaeruno Erefante, which I’m looking forward to as a nice amusing read. It’s been a little over a year since I read the first volume, but I think I remember enough that that won’t be a problem.

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

WWW Wednesday – December 7, 2022

December 7, 2022 RyanLeave a comment

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

I’ve managed to make some more decent progress in Tracking the Chupacabra by Benjamin Radford since last week. The chapters I read through were a lot more up my alley, as they dealt with looking into actual supposed sightings and even recovered bodies of supposed chupacabras, as well as the experiences of the people who found them. I was especially interested in one account where the woman who found the body, who has turned it into something rather lucrative for herself, remarked about assumed photos of the creature from 100 years ago. It’s fascinating that the common assumption among people, including myself growing up, is that the chupacabra is old folklore. The most startling thing about this book is still the fact that accounts of the creature only date back to 1995. I want to try and get this done before next week, as I really need to move onto other books if I’m going to get them finished before the year is out.

Recently Finished

Nothing this week either. I really need to crack open some comic books.

Reading Next

The Myth of Sisyphus With only three weeks remaining in December, I’m really not sure if I can start anything bigger than graphic novels or Galatea by Madeline Miller. I really want to try though, so we’ll have to see how things go. What is most important to me is that I finish reading A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris rather than something I haven’t even started yet, though, so I will be prioritizing that. Another prospective read that has popped up for me though is The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, which I bought a little while ago. It’s only a little under 150 pages long, despite looking longer than that, so I’m considering maybe squeezing that in. We shall see.

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

WWW Wednesday – November 30, 2022

November 30, 2022 RyanLeave a comment

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

Tracking the Chupacabra I am ashamed to say I’ve still kept my streak going with neglecting A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris. I have to finish it before the end of the year or I will lose my mind, though, so it’s getting done one way or another. In the meantime, I have been able to make some decent progress on Tracking the Chupacabra by Benjamin Radford despite the last six days having been busier with one of my jobs. It finished up examining the folkloric side of vampires and the like, with the latest chapter recounting the author undertaking an expedition to Nicaragua to search the jungle for the creature. I may have been projecting, but the chapter had a tongue-in-cheek feel that I related to but also found myself impatient with. I can gather that the author doesn’t take the creature’s existence seriously and nor do I, but this resulted in this chapter feeling more like a waste of time. It was still fun to read, but I just couldn’t shake that feeling either.

Recently Finished

Nothing this week.

Reading Next

Wolf in White Van I still intend to read Galatea by Madeline Miller sometime soon. I probably just need to set aside a single sitting to do so. With it being December tomorrow and knowing that visiting home for Christmas will likely result in no time spent reading there, I have to wonder what other books I can actually expect myself to finish before the New Year. If you don’t know, I don’t like books to bleed between years. I’m sure this is a common sentiment, but I’m equally sure others aren’t held back by this, so it bears bringing up. I’ll have to take some time to consider what I think is actually realistic for me; some of the books on my to-read list for this year, like Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle, don’t seem to be too long, so I may pick one of those.

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

WWW Wednesday – November 23, 2022

November 23, 2022 RyanLeave a comment

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

I managed to get a nice modest start on Tracking the Chupacabra by Benjamin Radford finally, though regrettably I didn’t get to any of A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris as well. At any rate, I’m enjoying the book quite a bit, as Radford’s style is making the subject a lot of fun to read while still being critical and informative. One of the early chapters is a brief history of vampires, since the creature is vampiric in nature, which led things down a path to how deeply colonialism has influenced the folklore of certain places in the world. I had no idea there were urban legends of white colonizers stalking the streets, wanting to harvest body parts from innocent bystanders caught unawares. Can’t say I blame them, all things considered. It was also amusing to have it pointed out just how inconsistent accounts of what the chupacabra is supposed to look like are. It seems a chupacabra can be whatever you want it to be.

Recently Finished

Nothing this week. Boo.

Reading Next

Galatea (book) I’ve still not made up my mind about a bigger book to read next, but I have recently made a purchase that I’m going to read through as soon as I can: Galatea by Madeline Miller. The book is actually a short story that Miller first published ages ago; in fact, I already own it on Kindle. Nevertheless, once I heard they released an actual book, I knew I had to buy it. Even at it’s tiny size, the story is only 50 pages or so long, so it should take virtually no time at all to complete, and I look forward to finally reading this story. I’ve put it off long enough, but I guess being a bit of a Luddite with Kindle has paid off; I get to enjoy this physical book now.

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

WWW Wednesday – November 16, 2022

November 16, 2022 RyanLeave a comment

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

Nothing really to report on this front again this week, though it’s because I’ve actually managed to get yet another book finished. I will hopefully start reading more of A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris again soon.

Recently Finished

Last night I finished reading The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. I definitely liked this book the further I got along in it, though my feelings are more middling overall; it’s definitely a three out of five read for me. I don’t know what influences Chambers may have had, but I find this book really interesting as an early work of weird fiction all the same. Specifically, I wonder how his readers of the time must have reacted to it. Though it’s still niche, this genre is fairly well defined these days. Even people who don’t read it probably know the name Cthulhu. With the vague yet repeated references to the contents of the play “The King in Yellow” within these stories, making reference to a world under dark stars, twin suns, and strange moons, I have to wonder how much things like this had been written about before or if his readers were having an experience truly weird and new to them I wonder if this real book, though it originally included more stories than these, also inspired a fragment of the macabre fixation the play instills in its victims.

Reading Next

I still want to start reading Tracking the Chupacabra by Benjamin Radford soon, I just wanted to get The King in Yellow finished first. With so little time left in the year I really do have to wonder how much I’ll actually manage to make time to read, and more importantly, which books matter most to me that I actually go through soon. Part of me really wants to make sure I read Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, but what deters me is the fact that I would be start yet another trilogy. Since it’s looking like I won’t be finishing my scrappy to-read list of 12 books this year either, I wonder if I should maybe turn to some of my other challenges for the year so that they’re not completely left in the dust. I have a lot to consider and not a lot of time left at my disposal.

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

WWW Wednesday – November 9, 2022

November 9, 2022 Ryan3 Comments

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

Nothing at the moment. Technically, I’m still in the middle of both The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers and A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris, but I still haven’t made any further progress with either yet. The former of the two is rather short, though, so I’m going to push to get that finished ASAP.

Recently Finished

Last night I pushed myself to finish reading Pet Sematary by Stephen King. I’m still ruminating on my final impressions of the book, but I can confidently say that I quite liked it overall. The only thing I’m a little stuck on is just how much everything is drawn out until a climactic finish, when I was expecting that his son would be resurrected for a better part of the novel. I suppose I had expected that there would be more of a sense of hope, even just a fool’s hope, that Gage could come back normal. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that there is no hope for such a thing, however, and so much more of the final parts of the story is just Louis doing his macabre work to get his son’s body to the burial ground. It’s not so much that I didn’t like it and more that I have to reconcile my expectations vs. reality.

Reading Next

Tracking the Chupacabra It turns out a lot of the books I have left on my to-read list are all horror adjacent, if not outright horror, so my middling October efforts may well be supplemented by some of the books I want to read next. I still want to put better emphasis on what I’m currently reading in the short term, but in the slightly longer term I think I will try to read Tracking the Chupacabra by Benjamin Radford anyway, Halloween’s end be damned. I have had a particular interest in reading this soon, and I especially don’t want to put this one off until next year, so I’m going to commit to starting it here and now.

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