It’s WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.
• What did you recently finish reading?
I just finished reading a book that’s still in manuscript. It’s my second time through it—the first time, I took a red pencil to it most ferociously. Even working on the author’s draft, I couldn’t put it down.
This time I really couldn’t put it down. And for the record, the red marks are for typos.
The book is Cipher, by Pamela Mordecai. Mordecai has written award-winning poetry all her life, including the recent Subversive Sonnets, a hair-raising and beautiful collection. I’m confident that Cipher is going to find a home soon. It’s too darned good.
The story follows Grace Carpenter, born illegitimate and given at two months old to a large family living in an old plantation hut on the Caribbean island “St. Chris.” The story also follows persons close to Grace: her mother, a lover who gets a child on her, her adoptive grandfather, and an African priest whom Grace meets in her work studying HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. (There may be more, but my head is still awhirl.) Mordecai’s attention to life in the Caribbean is glorious yet hard-eyed, a sensual worship of nature and an exaltation of human heroism and tenderness. She doesn’t flinch at mentioning ugliness, but the villains don’t get center stage. What I come away with is a feeling for Grace’s childhood in fragrant and dangerous St. Chris, her world travels, and good deeds done in impossible situations, and moral dilemmas terribly and valorously met.
• What are you currently reading?
Currently I’m reading Beguiled, a contemporary romance by Patricia Burroughs, author of Scandalous. Beguiled is coming July 16 from Book View Café. This is a sweet story about a young single mother with three children. The sex is low on explicitness but high on sweet sensuality, and I guarantee you’ll fall for Cecilia and Jeff, the man she is destined to drive completely batty.
• What do you think you’ll read next?
I expect I’ll reread Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett, because I hear that Lifeline Theatre will be producing one of their amazing adaptations of this novel in their 2013-2014 season. If they don’t cast the versatile Peter Greenberg as Lieutenant Blouse, I for one will be one thousand percent astonished. I think I fell for him first as Lord Peter Wimsey (they’ve been recapping all four of their Dorothy Sayers Wimsey/Vane adaptations this year) but he turned in a languid and sinister Basil Lavenham (from Georgette Heyer’s The Talisman Ring), and satisfied utterly in Heyer’s Cotillion as well. Goodness knows who they’ll get to portray Sgt. Jackrum, the larger-than-life NCO who shepherds a squad of raw recruits into—and out of—a war no one can win in a Discworld version of eastern Europe. Can’t wait!
Okay, that wasn’t about the book, but if you’re a Pratchett fan and Chicagoan, you’ll want to see it, too. And reread Monstrous Regiment.
What about you? What have you been reading lately? Put the link to your WWW Wednesday entry in comments, or just tell us!
