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?

Currently I’m reading two books:

The Island by Victoria Hislop. I’d started reading this in the summer but put it on one side for a while. I’ve now picked it up again and am well into the story of the Petrakis’ family. All Alexis Fielding knows about her mother’s family is that Sophia grew up in a small Cretan village before moving to London. Eager to find out more she visits Plaka, a seaside village on Elounda Bay in eastern Crete which sits opposite Spinalonga Island, a former leper colony. There she finds Fotini, and at last hears the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters and a family rent by tragedy, war and passion. It combines historical and romantic fiction.

I’m also reading The Night of the Mi’raj by Zoe Ferraris, crime fiction set in Saudi Arabia. Nouf ash-Shrawi, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Saudi dynasty, has disappeared from her home in Jeddah just days before her arranged marriage, and when her battered body is found in the desert, it looks like she was murdered. But, for me, what is most fascinating in this book is the description of life in Saudi Arabia.

The last book I read is Another Part of the Wood by Beryl Bainbridge, my book for the Classics Club Spin. I’ll post my review in the next few days – on or before 31 October. It’s set at a holiday camp in a forest in Flintshire, Wales, where Joseph takes his mistress and son, together with a few friends, to stay in a cabin for the weekend – with absolutely disastrous results. It has a claustrophobic atmosphere as the tension between the characters builds to a climax.

Next I’ll be reading The Darkness Manifesto: How light pollution threatens the ancient rhythms of life by Johan Eklöf, one of my NetGalley books, which will be published on 3rd November 2022. He ‘encourages us to appreciate natural darkness and its unique benefits. He also writes passionately about the domino effect of damage we inflict by keeping the lights on: insects failing to reproduce; birds blinded and bewildered; bats starving as they wait in vain for insects that only come out in the dark. And humans can find that our hormones, weight and mental well-being are all impacted.’ (extract from the synopsis)

Johan Eklöf, PhD, is a Swedish bat scientist and writer, most known for his work on microbat vision and more recently, light pollution. He lives in the west of Sweden, where he works as a conservationist and copywriter. The Darkness Manifesto is his first book to be translated into English.

Although this is a weekly meme l’m taking part once a month at the moment.