The three ‘W’s are what are you reading now, what have you recently finished reading, and what are you going to read next, and you can find this week’s post at the host’s blog here if you want to check out other posts.

What are you currently reading?

Far too much at once! I’ve decided exam time is a terrible time for self-restraint, so I’m dipping in and out of a whole stack: Revenant Gun (Yoon Ha Lee), Murder in Piccadilly (Charles Kingston), The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (Cat Valente), Children of Time (Adrian Tchaikovsky) and The Shadow in the North (Philip Pullman). I accidentally picked up Revenant Gun just this morning and started racing through it; I shall send Yoon Ha Lee a stern fan note if I fail my exams because of it.

(I won’t actually fail my exams.)

The Valente’s a reread, of course; I felt like I needed something fun. Children of Time is newly picked up, mostly because it fell off my shelf at me, and who can argue with fate? I’m fascinated, I’ll admit. Speculative biology is a thing I can get behind. (I’m not sure how the virus could possibly work, though. Must be a DNA virus; RNA viruses don’t have good proofreading mechanisms, there’d be no way at all to control the behaviour of the virus over generations — not even generations of primates, but viral generations. Not sure DNA viruses are that much better at proofreading either…)

What have you recently finished reading?

I picked up and reread Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke completely on a whim, in between one block of studying and another. I still enjoyed it a lot; it’s rather Penny Dreadful-ish itself, in some ways, and I’m not sure about all the Orientalism at all. Still, as a nostalgia read it’s a solid one, and Sally’s still amazing. O for half of her skill with numbers and steady hand (though she can keep the pistol).

What will you be reading next?

It would be daft to try and guess, I think. More of the Fairyland books, definitely; I also plan to reread Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar books (I know, it doesn’t sound comforting/soothing if you know how heartbreaking those books are, but they’re so familiar and from a totally different part of my academic career).

Other than that, I don’t know. Maybe Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside; I did bring it with me in hopes of getting stuck in. Or Arabella and the Battle of Venus… or…

So! What are you reading?