“What I’m Reading” is my contribution to the WWW Wednesday 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
I’m two thirds of the way through Human Acts by Han Kang, the book I selected as a result of my TBR Book Jar lucky dip for January. The narrative is told from the perspectives of different people who were caught up in a student-led political protest in South Korea. Human Acts is a shortish novel but I’m taking a long time to read it because it’s such an intensely emotional narrative.
In parallel I’m continuing to read Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing,by Ann Morgan. This is partly based on her experiences of reading a book from every country participating in the 2012 Olympics. She poses the question of how to approach books that represent unfamiliar territory for a reader and whether, that unfamiliarity actually enhances the reading experience.
What I just finished reading
I enjoyed Mrs March by Virginia Feito back in 2024 though enjoyed does seem a strange word to use for a novel largely about a woman’s descent into paranoia. Her latest novel Victorian Psycho takes the idea of mental instability and ratchets it up to boiling point with a central character who is the governess from hell. It’s an utterly bonkers novel but highly entertaining. The paperback edition is due out in February.
What I’ll read next
You all know by now that i’m not a planner so this is a tough question. I might go for The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan an old and very tatty copy of which I found last week while searching for an entirely different book. I’ve seen multiple film versions so it will be interesting to see how far they departed from the book.
If not, I might opt for one of the advanced copies I’ve received via NetGalley. I steered well clear of NetGalley in 2025 because it was too tempting to request books and I found I wasn’t actually reading them. I’m aiming to bei more controlled this year.