Tag: book lists

WWW Wednesday!

~ whatmeread ~ 9 Comments

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

I’m reading Precipice by Robert Harris. It’s about British Prime Minister Asquith at the start of World War I and his affair with a much younger woman, Venetia Stanley (a descendent of the Venetia Stanley who was the main character in Viper Wine, by the way). Usually, his books are well researched and quite suspenseful, but I’m finding this one slow to get into and so far not that interesting. We’ll see if it improves. It seems like a similar subject to his book Munich, which was about Chamberlain trying to fight off World War II, but so far I found that novel a lot more compelling.

What I just finished reading

I just read Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish by Francesca Peacock. I’m not quite sure what possessed me to read two biographies of the same woman so close together (I read Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker last year), but I still found it interesting. This one is more academic than the other.

What I will read next

Now, that’s the question this time. I periodically look for books for my projects at the library first, hoping not to have to buy them, and this time four of them arrived at the same time. (I put them on hold and go pick them up when they’re ready.) I had been waiting for Telephone by Percival Everett for months. For the second time, it looks like the library gave up on it being returned and bought a new copy, because I was first in line for the hold and it took me several months to get it, and it looks new and unread. Once I read it, I will have finished the shortlist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize. It’s about a geologist who doesn’t seem to know how to deal with his family’s problems. If it’s anything like the others by him I’ve read, it’s funny and angry.

Also for my Pulitzer Prize project is The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. It will be the first book I’ve read from the 2022 shortlist. I don’t usually check out two books for the same project at once, but I had been waiting so long to get Telephone and had no idea it would arrive at the same time. This book is supposed to be funny, so I might read it last. It seems as if my sense of humor is out of sync with other people’s these days.

The book that sounds most interesting to me is These Days by Lucy Caldwell, about two women living in Belfast during World War II. It’s the last book I have to read for the 2023 Walter Scott Historical Fiction prize shortlist, so that’s another reason to read it first. It hasn’t been available from the library until now.

Finally, there’s Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, which combines two things I’m not terribly interested in, coming-of-age novels and sports (although I used to follow tennis, which is the sport in the book, and yes, I have reviewed two tennis books on this blog, Open by Andre Agassi and Levels of the Game by John McPhee). It’s the last book I need to read for the 2023 shortlist for the Booker Prize, though. That’s three books that are the last ones I need to read for a certain year and prize, which makes it harder to pick. It has one advantage over the others. It’s very short (although I notice the print is tiny).

Which one would you pick? Maybe I’ll let my commenters decide. And what have you been reading lately?

#ReadingIrelandMonth26: An Update to My Irish Writers Read in 2025 Post

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Well, I was really silly when I listed the books I read by Irish writers, because I searched by Ireland! But all my reading of Irish writers wasn’t set in Ireland. So, here is my original post, revised. The two additional books are listed with both the title and writer’s names in bold!

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Cathy of 746 Books is hosting the 12th year of Reading Ireland Month, and although I usually participate just a bit by reviewing a book or two by an Irish author, I thought I’d take her suggestion this time and make a post about books by Irish authors I’ve read or reviewed during the last year. So here goes, I think in order of the reading! These are all books read in 2025, so there’s some overlap with last year’s event.

Book Serendipity

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

Following the lead of Bookish Beck, I have been keeping track of instances of book serendipity, where the same subject comes up in more than one place around the same time. My lists aren’t nearly as comprehensive as Beck’s, maybe because I don’t have as much attention to detail. But here are a few I’ve noted in the past few months:

References to Pompey the Great in Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare and The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, read on the same day.

A transport with “Gypsy” in its name in Ancestry by Simon Mawer and The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller, read one after another.

Factions among the faculty of a girls’ school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark and the short story “The Greek Play” by H. C. Bailey in the British Library “Lessons in Crime,” read one after another.

A son of an important man disappears from school in adjacent stories in the British Library collection Lessons in Crime, “The Adventure of the Priory School” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and “The Missing Undergraduate” by Henry Wade.

In the category of related serendipity, two different blog reviews of books by Robert van Gulik randomly read on the same day.

#ReadingIrelandMonth26! Irish Writers Read in 2025

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

Cathy of 746 Books is hosting the 12th year of Reading Ireland Month, and although I usually participate just a bit by reviewing a book or two by an Irish author, I thought I’d take her suggestion this time and make a post about books by Irish authors I’ve read or reviewed during the last year. So here goes, I think in order of the reading! These are all books read in 2025, so there’s some overlap with last year’s event.

Classics Club Spin #43

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

It’s time for another Classics Club Spin. To participate, post a numbered list of 20 books from your Classics Club list (here’s mine) before Sunday, February 8th. Classics Club will announce a number on that day, and that determines the book to read before the 29th of March.

I think I’ve participated in every spin since I became a Classic Club member. At this date, I have just eight books on my list, so I’ll be repeating to get 20:

  1. The Tavern Knight by Raphael Sabatini
  2. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  3. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  4. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  5. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  6. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  7. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  8. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  9. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  10. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  11. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  12. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  13. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  14. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  15. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  16. The Tavern Knight by Raphael Sabatini
  17. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Duma
  18. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  19. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  20. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare

WWW Wednesday!

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

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

I just started reading the biography Oscar Wilde by Sheridan Morley. This book was kindly sent to me for review by Dean Street Press. I find Wilde a fascinating personality, so I’m hoping to gain some insight from this novel.

What I Just Finished Reading

I read A Fortunate Man by Henrik Pontoppidan for the Pontoppidan Review-Along in March. By the last few days, I felt as if I had been reading it forever (it’s more than 800 pages long), and I’ll have a lot to say about it in my review. It is a vast novel that attempts to bring in most of the important philosophies and currents affecting Danish life in the mid-nineteenth century.

What I Will Read Next

If I don’t read If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery next, I’ll have to send it back to the library unread! It’s one of only two books I need to read to finish the Booker Prize shortlist for 2022. I’m reading it for my Booker Prize project; hence, I have no idea what it’s about.

14th Anniversary! Top Ten Books of the Year!

~ whatmeread ~ 19 Comments

It’s hard to believe that yesterday was the 14th anniversary of my blog. As has become my habit, this is the time that I list my favorite books of the ones I reviewed during the year. As usual, I make my list from the Best of Ten books during the year.

This year was a tough one to pick, because I had twelve books that were difficult to choose among, along with all the other Best of Tens. I ended up with three or four fairly recent books and five or six classic novels, one comic novel, three novels about the course of the main character’s childhood and life, four historical novels and one partially historical, one nonfiction memoir, one mystery, and one drama with a twist. Three were by men, and seven by women. Two of these books were re-reads for me.

So, here they are, in the order I reviewed them: