The 3 Ws…

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

Currently Reading:

The World Of The Unknown: All About Ghosts by Usborne Books, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan, Shropshire Folktales by Amy Douglas, Morgana by Neven Iliev, and Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff In Simple Words by Randall Munroe.

Still a ridiculous looking list – I really need to get a few of these finished so it can stop feeling like I have 3586 tabs open in my brain remembering where all my books are.

I particularly enjoyed the page in Thing Explainer about microwave ovens (Food-Heating Radio Box) this week, and the Ghosts book goes well with Supernatural which I have been watching recently as well.

Morgana continues to be bananas. The doppelgänger-now-mimic has gained its own pet house-mimic and this brings me far more joy than it probably should.

The new one on this list this week is Bookworm which I think I started reading a couple of years ago and then put it down and forgot it, so started it again because I couldn’t actually remember it. I am loving it far more than I usually do non-fiction books, it is a memoir of the author’s childhood reading and so far there has been quite a lot of crossover between her reading and my own, which has been a comforting wander down memory lane. Milly-Molly-Mandy, Famous Five, The Borrowers, Classic Ladybird Books, Ballet Shoes… all of these have come up and more, plus some I haven’t read but knew of, and others still that passed me entirely by. The author is slightly older than me, I think, which is where some of the titles I’m not hugely familiar with come from – but their descriptions and narrative of what they got from those books fit with the stories that were my equivalent and the fondness with which they are all recalled is like a blanket on a cold evening.

I am about half way through it now, and I am looking forward to reading the rest as it is a nice gentle read with enough character, humour, and familiarity that my usual issues with the genre are not coming up.

Recently finished:

I finished The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman over the weekend – what a fabulous magical steam-punky romp that was! I am resisting immediately hunting down the rest of the series, but if they happen to present themselves to me at any point, I am not sure I could resist.

I also finished the Usborne UFOs book which was as delightful as I remembered it being.

These have taken me up to 8 books finished so far this year – I think I am going to aim for 52 as my target, which means I am ahead for now, allowing for the inevitable slump months some point in the future!

What’s Next?

Rather excitingly, I am off to Birmingham for the Book Launch Tour of Leigh Bardugo’s Hell Bent with Liberty tonight. This is the sequel to Ninth House which I finally read earlier this month after owning it since… well, since Liberty and I went to the Launch Tour for that when it came out. (Ahem. I do read books and not just hoard them like a dragon, honest!)

Rather than putting it on a shelf as a ‘if I read a few books on my TBR then I can read that’ reward, I am going to dive straight in because 1) I want to, 2) I have read loads off my TBR backlog recently, and 3) I want to.

(I am so excited to read this, but the cover does give me the heebie-jeebies a little, not going to lie.)

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Oh! I have abandoned GoodReads, if anybody followed me over there, and defected over to StoryGraph which is much the same sort of thing only it isn’t owned by Amazon and it gives you pretty graphs and progress charts. My profile is here if you want to check it out, and if you also wish to continue having an online reading journal but without Amazon using it as another way to try and make you buy stuff then I recommend it heartily. You can even import your GoodReads data so you don’t lose your book history, it can all move with you!

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