It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report
- What I am reading now
- What I just finished reading
- What I intend to read next
This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading or plan to read.
What I am reading now
Right now, I’m reading There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. I’m not sure where I heard of this book, but I’m always interested in Russian writers. This book is written backwards, starting at the back of the book, and I’ve barely started it, so we’ll see how it goes. Also, it’s short, and although that usually doesn’t figure in to my reading, right now it’s a plus.
What I just finished reading
Well, that depends on how you count. I took a short plunge into Slowness by Milan Kundera. It is very short, and I hadn’t read any Kundera, was just familiar with the movie version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. However, it seemed more like a philosophical treatise than a novel. Almost nothing had happened by 20 pages in. I got bored. Yes, that’s right. Slowness was too slow for me. Not usually a problem.
So that leaves the book before, an Agatha Christie I hadn’t read before, Death Comes as the End. Unusually, it is set in Egypt, not in Christie’s Egypt but in 2000 AD or so. Still, it is a mystery.
What I intend to read next
It’s looking like my next book will be another mystery, The Widow of Bath by Margot Bennett. I read one other book by Bennett, and I liked it very much.
What? Me Read? 
It’s an odd Christie, isn’t it? I liked it a lot when I was younger but I tried to listen to the audiobook recently and couldn’t get into it at all. It may have been the narrator though – it wasn’t Hugh Fraser. I’m intrigued as to what you’ll think of The Widow of Bath…
I didn’t mention this in my review, but it is written in a sort of stilted way, at least the dialogue is, perhaps Christie’s idea of how the Egyptians spoke.
I haven’t read that Agatha Christie title yet either! The premise does sound intriguing.
It’s certainly different.
SHame Kundera didn’t click for you — I absolutely adore him!
I’ll try something else. Any recommendations?
My personal favourite is “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, but I also love “Ignorance”, which I think is a bit shorter and maybe more accessible. I find both very moving: “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” has so many poignant and insightful things to say about memory and grief, and “Ignorance” is a very interesting (and sometimes funny!) look at exile and the complicated feelings of going back to a home country that isn’t really as you remember it at all anymore.
Kundera definitely has a “philosophical” style in the sense that he likes to interweave the characters/plots in with observations about the topic, but once you get into the rhythm of his writing it can be very rewarding! It all comes together quite beautifully in the end.
OK, thanks for the suggestions!
The Christie book sounds very intriguing! I like the idea that it’s a departure from her usual. I’ve got a lot of Christie books still to read, though, before I get to it. 🙂
There seem to be hundreds of them!