It’s Wednesday, so time to address the three Ws:

• What are you currently reading?
• What have you recently finished reading?
• What are you reading next?

And linking up with Taking on a World of Words.

What are you currently reading?

I’m deep into The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen — I think I’ll finish it today. It’s proved to be exactly the kind of microhistory I enjoy, rambling through the years to look at the ways people have started to express themselves on paper, from matter-of-fact accounting to diaries like Pepys and Anne Frank’s. It’s not a quick read, but it’s an absorbing one. I loved the glimpses of Leonardo da Vinci’s methods, including the cranky complaints of modern scholars about his awful handwriting.

What have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was Alastair Reynolds’ Permafrost, a hard SF time travel novella. I’m still not quite sure if the time paradoxes all sorted themselves out — I thought that there was one obvious one that would absolutely mess with the timeline, at the end, but sometimes I think I’m just not clever enough for time travel stories. It was still a fascinating structure, anyway.

What will you read next?

I should turn back to one of the books I’ve started but am currently neglecting — Sailor’s Delight by Rose Lerner, perhaps, or Cat Sebastian’s We Could Be So Good. I really liked both of them so far, my reading journey is just powered by whims, and I wasn’t quite in the mood for so much yearning/such clueless guys.

I do also want to read volume three of The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, while the first two are fresh in my mind. I’m terrible sometimes about leaving a series unfinished for so long I have to start over to finish it. I did say I want to finish more book series this year!

How about you? Any reading plans? Just read something amazing?