WWW Wednesday: 27 November 2019

Published on by Margaret

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WWW Wednesday is run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

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

a beautiful corpse

Currently I’m reading A Beautiful Corpse, crime fiction by Christi Daugherty, set in Savannah, Georgia. A beautiful law student has been killed and three men close to the victim are questioned. All of them claim to love her. All of them say they are innocent of her murder.  As journalist Harper McClain unravels a tangled story of obsession and jealousy, the killer turns his focus onto her. I’ve read over half the book and it is growing on me – I’m enjoying it more and more as I read on.

Watching the EnglishI’m also reading Watching the English by Kate Fox, a nonfiction book about the ‘Hidden Rules of English Behaviour’. I’ve only just started reading and so far it is really interesting as the author sets out her parameters and defines what she considers to be  ‘Englishness’ and why it is different from ‘Britishness’, which I think is a very tricky question and one that I have been puzzling over for years.

She refers in some instances to Jeremy Paxman (and I see from the index there are several references to him in this book) and she lists his book The English: A Portrait of a People, which I read about 5 years ago. I decided from reading his book that I didn’t really feel any clearer about what is is to be ‘English’ and it seemed there really is no such thing as ‘the English’ – we’re a mixture of all sorts, or as Paxman puts it, The English are a mongrel race‘. (page 59)

Furious hours

I’ve recently finished Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep, a nonfiction book about Willie Maxwell, an Alabama serial killer and the true-crime book that Harper Lee worked on obsessively in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird. I found this a fascinating book and posted my review yesterday

As for my next book I don’t know right now. I’m torn between wanting to read several, including A Pinch of Snuff by Reginald Hill, the 5th Dalziel and Pascoe novel, A Lovely Way to Burn by Louise Welsh, the 1st in her Plague Trilogy, Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (the last two as I’ve just finished reading Furious Hours).

Have you read any of these books?  Do any of them tempt you? 

18 thoughts on “WWW Wednesday: 27 November 2019”

  1. I’ll be really interested, Margaret, in your reactions to Go Set a Watchman and In Cold Blood. Either of them (or both!) would make good choices now you’ve read Furious Hours. And both are thoughtful reads in their own right. I’ll be keen to know what you think.

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  2. Furious Hours sounds fascinating. I too have Go Set A Watchman in my TBR pile so would tempted to go for that one. I’ve heard mixed reactions to it but it was a one pound bargain in the Oxfam bookshop so couldn’t resist.

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      1. Haha yes it’s kind of difficult to recommend one book from a WHOLE genre. Thanks though! 😊

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  7. I enjoyed Go Set a Watchman and can’t see why some peopel had a problem with the elderly Atticus, but I liked A Lovely Way to Burn too. Paxman is right about us being a bunch of mongrels. I recall from watching his Who Do You Think You Are programme that his granny (or some such) was from Glasgow.

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  9. I’m not convinced that Watching the English is going to be all that insightful if by the end of it you don’t get a clear picture of the difference between Englishness and Britishness. I would have thought defining English would be a critical element of the book

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