WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.
To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?
• What are you currently reading?
Technically I’m still halfway through my thorough reread of the Chalet School books by Elinor M Brent-Dyer: sixty books written over thirty-five years, a classic of the English girls’ boarding-school genre (despite being set largely in foreign lands: distance only made them all the more English). As it happens, though, I seem to be on furlough from gym-slips and schoolroom pranks; I guess everyone gets a half-term holiday.
Right now I’m reading The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo, a biography of the physicist Paul Dirac. I read once that biography is the lazy man’s non-fiction, but I want to challenge that: reading this is an exercise in self-education, as I keep reading a chapter and then spending half a day chasing down theorems, trying to wrap my head around quantum mechanics as a historical process through the twentieth century.
Meanwhile – because of course we live in the future – I am also reading a book on my phone: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters of Travel, which aren’t letters at all but more like a travel blog written for publication. That’s research of a sort, as I’m currently writing about Kipling on Mars, which is not in fact a destination he travelled to, but he certainly would have done given half a chance. Which is what I gave him, because I could.
• What did you recently finish reading?
On a slightly larger scale, I am not the only person who spent much of the last year rereading all of Iain Banks’ books. Iain was a friend as well as an inspiration; when FogCon proposed a panel to discuss his work, I kind of demanded to be on it. I’m not sure if no one else did, or what: but that didn’t happen, and instead I was empanelled with Tim Powers to talk about building magic systems. So I thought it would probably be a good idea to refresh my mind about the way that Tim builds magic systems, so I just reread Declare. Which is still a damn’ good book: it’s like John le Carre with, yeah, a Tim Powers magic system…
• What do you think you’ll read next?
What, apart from the other half of the Chalet School books? Well, there’s Old Mars sitting on the bedside bookshelf waiting for me – but that’s problematic, as I’m currently writing about Old Mars myself – the whole shebang, with canals and atmosphere and aliens and everything – as a province of the British Empire. I don’t like to read in the genre I’m currently writing, let alone a sub-genre so exactly targeted to what I’m doing myself. Is it research, or is it something else: a temptation, a vulnerability…? So I’ll probably let that lie. I’ve got a couple of contemporary mysteries from the library, which is an old pleasure resurgent and I’m glad to have it back; and I have The Tropic of Serpents by our own Marie Brennan, and I loved A Natural History of Dragons to which this is a sequel; and I have The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi, which again I loved the book that came before. And then there’s the most part of m’wife’s entire library, which I have yet to read, if I can forego the pleasures of rereading further in my own…
What about you? What are you reading, have you been reading, wanting to read next?
