WWW Wednesday: 15th July 2020

It’s July WWW Wednesday time! This is a weekly meme (but I tend to do it monthly) hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words. If you’re curious about what other people are reading right now too, join in! All you have to do is answer the three bookish questions below and pop your blog link on Sam’s weekly post in the comments.

So, this week…

/ WHAT ARE YOU READING NOW?

Well, my local library has just re-opened (who knows for how long) so I put my mask on and went straight there. I now have a lovely stack of books to read and I’ve started with one I actually began reading pre-lockdown and returned to the library in a panic when everything shut. Nice to be reunited with it! It’s Frankissstein: A Love Story by Jeanette Winterson. A very interesting story that has a dual narrative:

‘Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own in a vast underground network of tunnels. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his mom again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead… but waiting to return to life.’

/ WHAT HAVE YOU RECENTLY READ?

I’ve had a run of GREAT reads recently, two that really stand out are Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams and Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers. Click their titles for my full reviews and I fully recommend adding both to your TBR!

/ WHAT WILL YOU READ NEXT?

Looking at my library stack, I’m very intrigued by The Binding by Bridget Collins. I’ve heard such good things about it and do like an historical fiction read every now and then. Plus, the cover is dreamy.

‘Books are dangerous things in Collins’s alternate universe, a place vaguely reminiscent of 19th-century England. It’s a world in which people visit book binders to rid themselves of painful or treacherous memories. Once their stories have been told and are bound between the pages of a book, the slate is wiped clean and their memories lose the power to hurt or haunt them.

After having suffered some sort of mental collapse and no longer able to keep up with his farm chores, Emmett Farmer is sent to the workshop of one such binder to live and work as her apprentice. Leaving behind home and family, Emmett slowly regains his health while learning the binding trade.

He is forbidden to enter the locked room where books are stored, so he spends many months marbling end pages, tooling leather book covers, and gilding edges. But his curiosity is piqued by the people who come and go from the inner sanctum, and the arrival of the lordly Lucian Darnay, with whom he senses a connection, changes everything.‘

Sounds good, right? I’d love to know what you’re reading this week / plan on reading soon!

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