Although I’ve been having a fantastic time of reading others’ blogs since re-starting this one, I’ve been feeling a little isolated from the book blogging community, so I’m going to participate in this meme on a trial basis to see whether it helps me feel more connected to the community as a whole.
When I first started blogging, WWW was one of the first weekly events I discovered, and I got to know some fantastic books (and readers of said books), sadly we all stopped blogging at the same sort of time. So this is going to be a lovely walk down nostalgia lane.
WWW Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Sam @ Taking on a World of Words! All you have to do is answers the following three W questions:
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
What are you currently reading?
I’m 3/5ths of the way through Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Abley. It’s slow going as I keep putting down the book to grumble about the author’s beef with linguists using specialised words to describe specific phenomena when writing about linguistics.
I’ve read a page of The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History by Warner in the last week. A page! At this rate I should be done by 2025. It was a very well-written page though.
On Monday I started reading Chen Li’s translation of Justice. Reading Mandarin is still a novelty for me, and it takes a while for me to process a sentence, even when I can recognise all the characters in it. Luckily this is the perfect pace and subject material for a beginner. If I’m as enamoured with the book by the time I finish, I will certainly get a few more in the series.
What did you recently finish reading?
The brilliant L’Origine by Milgrom. I will be raving about this for the foreseeable future as the author did some absolutely brilliant things with the historical fiction genre. I’ve not felt as awe-struck about art history and historical fiction coming together since I read Girl With a Pearl Earring by Chevalier.
My review is here in case anyone wants to check it out.
What do you think you’ll read next?
I’ve had my eye on Gods of Jade and Shadow by Moreno-García for a while. I’d love to read that. Or if I haven’t finished any of the above books before May, I’ll want to pick up another book in French for May’s Tadoku (reading in a foreign language) challenge.
The link to Tadoku’s website is here in case anyone’s interested. If you enjoy reading in a non-native language then I heartily recommend it.
Wild Night In 
catherinebasedonthebook
April 21, 2021 at 15:49
The book about threatened languages sounds interesting (although I hate when authors go off on tangents too) I was at uni in North Wales where most people’s first language was Welsh – it’s amazing how they’ve brought the language back – I probably should have learned some to be honest!
wildnightin
April 23, 2021 at 14:17
If it were an interesting tangent then I would absolutely forgive it, but these ones are along the lines of “Chomsky said X in this paper he wrote, but my anecdote-based opinion contradicting him is Y”. The revival of Welsh is so heartening: it’s wonderful to watch it unfold in real time.
In case you decide to learn Welsh in the future: they’ve switched their classes to online Zoom-based ones which should be here to stay. For £45 (or £90 for one academic year) you get 2 hours of group lessons a week, and access to an online course system that is as excellent as the Open University’s. (A friend and I started learning Welsh this way in January and it’s been a wild ride!)