Hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words, WWW Wednesday is all about three questions:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

So here we go!

What are you currently reading?

Technically, I have three different books in progress.

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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke) sits by my bedside, awaiting my attention. It’s so blasted large, I can’t really fit it in my work bag and so it only gets read during the few nights a week where I’m not so sleepy I can barely keep my eyes open five minutes after my head hits the pillow. Which is too bad, because I’m loving it. It’s quirky, the footnotes are a lot of fun, and she captures the voice of mid-19th century England so well, it’s almost like reading contemporary instead of historical fiction.6795129

Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie) is my current commute book; I just started it a couple of days ago, and already I’m thoroughly enjoying my first Rushdie read. His prose is lyrical and his descriptions so entertaining, I don’t even want to skim.

However, I’ve been in a mood the last two days, and I wanted something that needs a little less focus and thought, so I turned to an old favorite —

T947612he Westing Game (Ellen Raskin). Seriously, I could reread this book every month, and I still wouldn’t get tired of it. I don’t even remember how it came into my possession a couple decades ago; it was probably some Scholastic Book Fair find, or a random bookstore pickup. All I know is, I read it around the same time I started getting into my Agatha Christie phase (around 10 or 11, when I wanted something more interesting than just the BSC or the Sweet Valley Twins), and it never fails to make me happy.

The characters are delightful (Turtle Wexler has a place near and dear to my heart) and the mystery is so fun and twisty, even though I know what’s coming, I still read it with relish.

What did you recently finish reading?889028

I recently finished Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys), and it was lovely. Her descriptions and prose are sparse, but she so economically used words, flowery language was rendered unnecessary. It offers a different take on Jane Eyre‘s “Madwoman in the Attic,” making her not just less of a mystery, but also a strong, beautiful woman that, under different circumstances, could have been so much more than a Bronte plot device.

After the A to Z Challenge ends I’m going to get back into writing reviews, but for now, this will have to do.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I honestly don’t know. I have an incredibly long list of books, classics and not classics, that I want to read. I might try

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or

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or

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or

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All of which sit on my shelf, waiting, unread. Any thoughts?