WWWednesday 9th May 2018

I only get around to doing it once a month, but here is a lovely meme you might want to take part in, hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words. It’s open for anyone to join in and is a great way to share what you’ve been reading! All you have to do is answer three questions and share a link to your blog in the comments section of Sam’s blog.

The three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?

What did you recently finish reading?

What do you think you’ll read next?

A similar meme is run by Lipsyy Lost and Found where bloggers share This Week in Books #TWiB.

Currently reading:

Negar Djavadi: Disoriental, transl. Tina Kover

A saga of 20th century Iran seen through the eyes of a young woman who came to France as a child.

… the truth of memory is strange, isn’t it? Our memories select, eliminate, exaggerate, minimize, glorify, denigrate. They create their own versions of events and serve up their own reality. Disparate, but cohesive, Imperfect yet sincere. In any case, my memory is so crammed with stories and lies and languages and illusions, and lives marked by exile and death, death and exile, that I don’t even really know how to untangle the threads anymore.

Just finished:

Olga Tokarczuk: Flights, transl. Jennifer Croft

Not quite a memoir or travel journal, more like a writer’s notebook crammed full of pithy observations, fragments of stories, snatches of ideas waiting to be developed, and beautiful phrases just made to be quoted.

Describing something is like using it – it destroys: the colours wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what’s been described begins to fade, to disappear. This applies most of all to places. Enormous damage has been done by travel literature… Guidebooks have conclusively ruined the greater part of the planet… they have debilitated places, pinning them down and naming them, blurring their contours.

Next up:

Eliot Pattison: Savage Liberty

This is a book I’ve been sent on Kindle to review, a historical mystery set during the period of the American Revolutionary War. This is the fifth in a series, but I hope to be able to keep track of things. and find some good escapism along the way. The summary is as follows:

After a ship from London explodes in Boston Harbor, Duncan MacCallum, an exiled Scotsman living in Boston, discovers that the ship was deliberately sabotaged by two French agents who stole a secret ledger being sent to the Sons of Liberty. In his attempt to pursue the truth, Duncan winds up falsely charged with treason and murder and is left with no choice but to find the guilty men and the stolen document, in order to clear his name. Historical figures like Samuel Adams and John Hancock show up along the way.