WWW Wednesday 9

This meme/link-up is hosted by Taking on a World of Words

What are you currently reading?

Still a little stuck on Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's my first time reading someone else's footnotes, and it slows me down quite a bit. I like footnotes as a sort of literary device (The Bartimaeus Sequence, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), but this is a new approach to me. Is it weird to treat book club reads as schoolwork? I feel like I need to take notes and prepare talking points.

What did you recently finish reading?
This week, I read the second half of the Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner. The King of Attolia was even better than the previous two books, and I swear A Conspiracy of Kings "taught" me more about politics than the entire ASoIaF series did. I also read the sequel to Crazy Rich Asians, which was China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan. The plot's a lot more dramatic and telenovela-esque, but I've learned to love well-executed telenovela plot twists since Jane the Virgin. I look forward to the next books in the series. 

What do you think you'll read next?
For now, I just want to finish Tender is the Night. I did go a little crazy in the bookstore last week, though, and I look forward to reading Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson and Be More Chill by Ned Vizzini, as well as a graphic novel I'm saving for my birthday.

The Annotated TBR #1

(I came across this idea on Badass Romance.)

There are dozens of books on my shelf that I've been meaning to read for ages. Most of them are from freshman year, when I discovered the thrill of secondhand bookstores on campus. These bookstores had carefully curated selections of more highbrow/intellectual-sounding authors, all these paperbacks with tasteful cover art and great reviews.

Here are some I've been intending to read since the beginning of 2015:

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke

Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antoine Fraser

Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

Jane Eyre

The Once and Future King

The Life and Times of Akhnaton

Sense and Sensibility

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now by Maya Angelou

Sherlock Holmes Volume 1

And here are some I specifically picked out for June:

At the start of the year I planned to reread Roald Dahl in June. Maybe just Matilda or Fantastic Mr. Fox or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one of his iconic works. Probably supplemented with a little progress on his biography, Storyteller by Donald Sturrock.

I've always been curious about Never Let Me Go, and the Long Distance Book Club decided on this for June. Now I kind of regret not buying any of the secondhand copies I came across over the years.

From the books I owned previously:
Tracy Chevalier is always an easy-ish read, complex but uncomplicated, if that makes sense. I should finally finish Burning Bright.
I've had Marie Antoinette: The Journey and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell on shelf for at least five years. Time to make some real progress.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, ano na? I made my friend choose between Tender is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, and This Side of Paradise for the next LDBC book, and she picked the first one.

One Filipino book for this month! Hopefully Sixty-Six.

Plus, of course, whatever e-books strike my fancy.

WWW Wednesday 8

This meme/link-up is hosted by Taking on a World of Words

What are you currently reading?

A friend and I are doing a long-distance book club, and our second book is Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

What did you recently finish reading?
Since my last WWW (and finals week, and one-week sembreak), I've read seven books. Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan and Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty were both fast-paced, gossipy books that were really entertaining reads. My Wish List by Gregoire Delacourt was about a woman who won the lottery and couldn't decide how to spend her winnings, and it really got me thinking. The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness was a little boring, but I felt I had to finish it because I'd already committed to it. For our LDBC, our first book was Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which has the least interesting narrator I've ever encountered, but the Norfolk parts were lovely. More interesting reads were The Thief and The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner. They're full of twists I never saw coming, and I loved how the myths/literature of one culture was another culture's actual religion/reality.

What do you think you'll read next?
I plan on reading the next book in the series, The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner.