WWW Wednesday – December 1, 2021

WWW Wednesday is hosted by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

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

Right now, I am reading And She Was by Alison Gaylin, suspense fiction about a woman haunted by the abduction of her sister when they were both children. Brenna became a missing persons investigator but she hasn’t solved her sister’s disappearance (I have a few chapters left) although her current case has some odd similarities. I had tried one of Gaylin’s books before and found it mediocre but someone recommended this series, so I decided to give her another try. Oddly enough, my sister is reading Gaylin’s new book, The Collective. It is funny when we find ourselves reading the same book or author simultaneously.

Back in 2010, a kind friend in London made me a photocopy of Stella Riley’s then impossible-to-find The Mésalliance, which I greatly enjoyed – she is probably my favorite (living) historical romance writer. Now that her books are available in paperback, I have been ordering the ones I am missing, and A Trick of Fate just arrived. I thought I would read one chapter last night and, of course, I got caught up in it and kept on going . . .

I just finished Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center, after having enjoyed Things You Save in a Fire back in June (which seems like years ago; I have lost all sense of time during the pandemic). It was a charming story about a flawed and snarky heroine who decides to get over her divorce by going on an extreme wilderness trip in Montana, unexpectedly accompanied by her brother’s best friend. You would obviously never catch me on such a trip no matter what I was trying to prove but I especially laughed when Helen was told she could only bring one book on her three-week excursion. Admittedly, she was usually too exhausted to read and her backpack was already too heavy.

I also read The Missing Ones, a mystery by Patricia Gibney set in Ireland. The heroine, Detective Lottie Parker, is a still-grieving widow who neglects her three teenagers while focusing on a case involving missing children, murders, and sinister priests. This is the first in the series and I thought it had potential but was poorly edited, perhaps self-published. I would read more if they were available in the US but would not go out of my way to buy them.

Next up is The Matzah Ball by Jean Meltzer.  There has been a lot of buzz about this book and after all the Christmas-themed books I have read I thought it would be fun to read about a Jewish heroine who has to write a Hanukkah romance.  She had me at Oy! to the world.  I am also planning to read Countdown by Deborah Wiles, first in her Sixties trilogy that concludes with Anthem, which I found impressive and just reviewed.

I chose The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman for my judges’ clerks book group that meets next week. The women-former-clerks put up with a lot of toxic masculinity from Ernest Hemingway in recent months and, as it was my turn to choose, I wanted something with a feminist edge (also short so they would all read it).

Still wondering – if you had a three-week trip and could only bring one book, what would it be? Something you had read or something you'd been meaning to read (which can be risky)?  Middlemarch or The Instance of the Fingerpost are really long (good) but once I brought Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy on a long plane trip and found it very tedious (bad).