Wednesday, June 14, 2023

WWW Wednesday - Flag Day, 2023

WWW Wednesday is sponsored 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?

Currently Reading
This is exciting: my Capstone from graduate school just got published! I wrote about author/photographer Tana Hoban and her papers, which she left to the de Grummond Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi. If you are interested, here is the issue of SLIS Connecting with my article. I submitted this research (which served as our thesis) more than a year ago, so it is an odd feeling to reread it.

I am also rereading Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly (1942), which is this month’s selection for the de Grummond Book Group, and listening to The Darkest Evening by Ann Cleeves (2021) on my commute.

Recently Finished
I enjoyed Happy Place by Emily Henry (2023), although the characters are miserable for most of the book. Five close friends (and a partner) from college have stayed close and meet every year in Maine but this year Harriet and Wyn have broken up and have delayed telling anyone lest the friend group disintegrate. Deciding to pretend they’re still together might preserve the vacation but makes them even more sad and stressed. This author is for fans of Emily Giffin and Katherine Center and the TV show Friends.

A Marriage of Inconvenience by Penny Reid (2018) was highly recommended. It’s about a billionaire heiress to a pharmaceutical company whose cousin wants to have her committed so he can manage her shares. In desperation, Kat asks a man she’s had a crush on for years to marry her. He is a crude but lovable native Bostonian and the audiobook made his nonstop obscenity and alleged accent too prominent but there were some funny moments despite an outrageous plot. I definitely wanted to know what would happen next although found the denouement disappointing. This book is part of a series about a knitting group in Chicago and I liked it enough to read (or listen to) more.
Next

As soon as I finish Middlemarch (1872), which I am enjoying and is my Radcliffe Book Group’s choice for June and July, I am looking forward to Watch Us Shine (2023). Here is how the publisher describes it: Marisa de los Santos returns to the world of her beloved, bestselling novels Love Walked In and Belong to Me in an enthralling tale of sisterhood, sacrifice, and the enduring power of love. My copy just arrived.
I am also planning to read They Do It With Mirrors by Agatha Christie (1952) for ReadChristie2023 and have my 20 Books of Summer piled on a table to entice me.

4 comments:

Claire (The Captive Reader) said...

I'm so excited about Watch Us Shine!

Cath said...

All sorts of interesting stuff there. I like the sound of Happy Place, I read something else by her, Beach Read, which I quite liked but which also annoyed me somehow. I thought the two main characters wallowed too much in their self-absorption.

TracyK said...

I had to look up what a Capstone is. How great that it got published! Tana Hoban sounds like an interesting subject although I confess I did not know who she was until I looked her up.

I am eager to see what you think of Middlemarch. I loved They Do It With Mirrors by Christie. I hope you like it. How do you keep up with all that reading?

CLM said...

Tracy, I am really enjoying Middlemarch but had to take a break to reread Seventeenth Summer tonight. I find this book so vivid and romantic that I was astonished some of the others in my group could barely finish! I did not think I had reread it very many times but there were several places where I knew the exact language the author had used. It is very dated but I really like it.

Tana Hoban is not very well known outside of educational picture books but my original topic was an equally obscure author named Constance Savery. I chose both because I wanted to analyze papers from the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi. Alas, some of the Constance Savery materials got destroyed in a flood and they made me pick another topic back in early January 2022. It was very upsetting at the time to have to start my research all over again but I survived.

Cath, I think all of Emily Henry's characters wallow instead of having a conversation that would avoid much wasted time and angst. There must be a lot of people who identify with this miscommunication!

Claire, the topic of Watch Us Shine sounded a bit depressing but she is such an amazing writer! Why doesn't someone make a movie of Love Walked In?