It’s 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 did you recently finish reading?
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, by John McWhorter. It’s a history of English, but it doesn’t focus on the vocabulary changes that I’m already familiar with; instead, it digs into the grammatical shifts along the way. Which is much more fascinating than it sounds: I hadn’t realized how much of its grammar English shed in between Beowulf and today, and why. My only disappointment is that there’s an interesting political discussion to be had about that, which McWhorter mostly shies away from.
• What are you currently reading?
Power of Three, by Diana Wynne Jones. I did a re-read of all her books after she passed away, and in cleaning spam comments out of my post on this one, I found myself in a mood to pick it up again. It’s hard to summarize without giving spoilers, but it’s a great story about curses and cooperation and family and, oh, all kinds of things.
• What do you think you’ll read next?
I need to read Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing: 7 Essays, 4 Letters, & 5 Interviews for a course I’ll be teaching this summer, but I’ve been doing a lot of “work” reading lately, so I may pick up something else light and quick first.
What about you? What have you been reading lately? Put the link to your WWW Wednesday entry in comments, or just tell us!
