WWW Wednesday 2.21.24

This weekly meme is hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words. All you need to do to participate is answer the following three questions.

What are you currently reading?

I have a few other books that I’m in the middle of but these are the ones that I am actively reading right now. One of the prompts for the Battle of the Girl Band readathon is to read a book with the word “say” (there are three other words I could choose from but I really want to read one with the word say since I have so many options on my kindle for it) and I’m really struggling to find one I like. This is my third attempt at this prompt and so far I’m enjoying The Last Time I Say Goodbye but I’m only a chapter in. It is about a teen girl dealing with her brother’s suicide so it’s a very heavy read.

I fell behind on the From Below buddy read but the great part is that Allison’s videos are still there waiting for me to read when I get to them. I had a very reading heavy long weekend which meant I was reading instead of watching the corresponding videos for each section. I will be finishing this book this week though. So far I’m enjoying it but it does seem overly long at the moment. Hopefully I change my mind about that when I finish the story. I’m 72% done and I have no idea how Coates is going to wrap it up.

Thornhedge is a reread for me that I’m reading for both the Battle of the Girl Band’s readathon and Dusty Book Sniffer’s week 3 jenga challenge. I loved this book the first time and I think I’m appreciating it even more the second time around.

What have you recently finished reading?

My kids had a long weekend off for President’s Day and on top of that my youngest didn’t go to school on Thursday because he was sick. And since he was sick and the massive storm came through we were mostly stuck inside. We were planning a trip to the snow since we live close to it but hopefully there will still be snow when they have spring break next month. Anyways, my little one is still at an age where cuddles with Mom are what he wants when he’s sick so we spent a lot of time on the couch together for a few days so I got a ton of reading done. But I gave everything I read either four or five stars so it was a pretty good week of reading.

As always I will have reviews coming for these. Which I actually sat down yesterday and scheduled some! But the standout of the weekend was definitely Happy Place. I cannot believe I waited so long to read it especially since I bought it on release day. This book was everything to me and easily one of my top five books of all time. I love the writing, the characters, the setting and the conflict felt so real to me. I feel like I might reread this book in the summer because I connected so strongly to everything and I already want to be back in this world.

I also DNF’d Say Her Name, The Wild Trees and Say You’ll Stay. The Wild Trees was supposed to be about the Redwood Forests but it was a lot of detail about the people who research or climb them and it just wasn’t interesting to me. Say Her Name was interesting but I had a hard time with the main character. The story would have made more sense if she was in college because she felt so juvenile to me. And the synopsis for Say You’ll Stay is so freaking misleading it made me angry because it mentions the protagonist moving back home after her husband’s betrayal. Well, the first chapter of this book is her walking in on him unalive and it is pretty graphic and the synopsis should say death and not betrayal. It has honestly put me off reading any more Corinne Michaels. But I have six more of her books on my Kindle so I’ll eventually give her another go.

What do you think you’ll read next?

*I started this book last month but after I finish Thornhedge this will be the next book I pick up.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.