#WWWWednesday – 26th May 2021

Posted on by whatcathyreadnext

WWWWednesdays

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

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

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

Currently reading

The Baby Is Mine by Oyinkan Braithwaite (advance review copy, courtesy of Midas PR and The Reading Agency)

When his girlfriend throws him out during the pandemic, Bambi has to go to his Uncle’s house in lock-down Lagos. He arrives during a blackout, and is surprised to find his Aunty Bidemi sitting in a candlelit room with another woman. They both claim to be the mother of the baby boy, fast asleep in his crib.

At night Bambi is kept awake by the baby’s cries, and during the days he is disturbed by a cockerel that stalks the garden. There is sand in the rice. A blood stain appears on the wall. Someone scores tribal markings into the baby’s cheeks. Who is lying and who is telling the truth?

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson (paperback)

Miss Pettigrew, an approaching-middle-age governess, was accustomed to a household of unruly English children. When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected turn. The alluring nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, becomes her new employer, and Miss Pettigrew encounters a kind of glamour that she had only met before at the movies. Over the course of a single day, both women are changed forever.

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams (audiobook)

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip, and when she learns that the word means “slave girl,” she begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.

As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

Recently finished

Links from the titles will take you to my review.

Pathfinders by Cecil Lewis

This Other Island by Steffanie Edward

A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville (audiobook)

Love and Miss Harris by Peter Maughan

What Cathy (will) Read Next

Sword of Bone CoverSword of Bone by Anthony Rhodes (eARC, courtesy of the Imperial War Museum and Random Things Tours)

It is September 1939. Shortly after World War II is declared, Anthony Rhodes is sent to France, serving with the British Army. His days are filled with the minutiae and mundanities of army life—friendships, billeting, administration—as the months of the “Phoney War” quickly pass and the conflict seems a distant prospect. 

It is only in the spring of 1940 that the true situation becomes clear. The men are ordered to retreat to the coast and the beaches of Dunkirk, where they face a desperate and terrifying wait for evacuation.

10 thoughts on “#WWWWednesday – 26th May 2021”

    1. As it’s a Quick Read title and therefore part of a literacy initiative plus only £1 you can’t go wrong really can you? I shall be passing my copy on to a good cause locally.

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    1. To be honest I’m finding it a bit slow so far but I’m only 30% through that may change. Also I’m coming to the conclusion that perhaps audiobooks are not for me. They seem to take so much longer than reading the actual book would and I find I really need to concentrate to remember what’s going on. I’m not one of those people who can be doing other things while listening to an audiobook. On the other hand, they’re soothing to listen to in the evening…sometimes too soothing 😴

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      1. I do not listen at the normal speed, that is way too slow for me. I listen anywhere from 1.25 to 1.5 depending on the narrator. It took me years before I really enjoyed audiobooks, but now I am hooked. I hope it gets better for you Cathy.

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