“What I’m Reading” is my contribution to the WWW Wednesday’s meme run by Sam from Taking On a World of Words. The Ws represent three questions:
- What are you currently reading?
- What did you recently finish reading?
- What do you think you’ll read next?
What I’m reading now
#10booksofsummer has gone so well this year that I’m currently on book 12. This is The Interview by J David Simons which was published this month. The plot centres on a man who was once the biggest name in TV as the host of a mega popular talk show. Now however he’s hiding out in a lakeside cabin for reasons that only become apparent in the final third of the novel. All we know is that his downfall is connected to the US President. I loved Simons’ last novel, An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful, so was delighted to receive a review copy.
What I just finished reading
Birnam Wood is the first novel published by Eleanor Catton since winning the Booker Prize in 2013 with The Luminaries., What a disappointment this new novel turned out to be. It’s about the conflict between an activist gardening group in New Zealand and an egotistical billionaire over land in one of New Zealand’s national parks. I though the environmentalist versus capitalist battle would be fertile ground but this book simply descended into a cliched thriller.
What I’ll read next
I’ve read only one of the Booker Prize longlist titles (The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller) so far so I might take a trip to the library to see if they any of the other longlisted books. I don’t hold out a great deal of hope because it looks like the Booker judges have chosen quite a fair number of titles that are not even published yet.
So plan B could be Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, one of the classics that my husband keeps advocating I read. Or I might go for Marking Time, the second title in the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. It’s been a while since I read and enjoyed the first book The Light Years so it would be good to see what the various members of the extended Cazalet family is up to now.
What do you think? Are there any Booker longlisted titles that you’d recommend? What would get your vote – Grapes of Wrath or Cazalet??