What the Wenches Are Reading

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Click through to see what we're reading this week! 




Angela:  This week I read The Chimes by Anna Smaill. Set in a futuristic London, the premise of the book was compelling in that people weren’t able to retain their memories. If they did retain memories, it was due to items they kept upon themselves or due to bodymemory. The book fell short for me in that it was heavily overlaid with musical references. If you are a person who understands music composition, I’m sure you would have gotten a lot more out of this book than I did. I often felt like I was missing the essence of the book by not knowing more about music.

 Anne: I’ve been bouncing around reading a little bit of everything this week. I still can’t settle on something. I’ve been listening to All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. It’s definitely interesting seeing World War II from such different perspectives than we usually do. It’s fascinating to me that there are sooooooo many novels, movies, etc. set in this time period.

 Barb: I made a little progress in Grant, but not a whole lot, to be honest. I did, however, watch the entire second season of Stranger Things, and that was effin fantastic. 

Kathi: I’m still reading The Chimes, but very slowly. I’ve been traveling, and quite frankly this isn’t what I’d call a vacation read or easy to follow by grabbing a few pages here and there. (That’s true of everything I’ve read lately, though.) This book requires more concentration than I’ve been able to give it. So my plans to read Andy Weir’s new book Artemis on my return trip haven’t worked out, but that’s the carrot I’m dangling to motivate me to read faster. When I’m reading The Chimes, I find the world fascinating and the plot intriguing, I just haven’t been in the right environment to dedicate the time and attention it requires. One thing I did instead of read was watch the Netflix adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, which I enjoyed immensely.

 Merit:  This week I read A Darker Shade of Magic (Shades of Magic #1) by V. E. Schwab, a fantasy which takes place within four parallel worlds with four parallel Londons, each with a different history, monarch(s), people, and magic. Only the very rare people, born with magic in their blood, can travel between the worlds, and they serve as liaisons between the rulers of the Londons. The main characters are well rounded and compelling, the worlds are threatened, the stakes are high, and treachery lurks at every corner. I love the complex characters, their banter is fun, and the magic is blood magic, so the dark is darker and gruesome at (most) times. Just started the second book in the series.

 Zee: Too jetlagged to read right now. But drowned myself in Alisha Rai's Forbidden Hearts series on the plane. Sigh. It's perfection. Absolute, unmarred perfection.

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