What have you recently finished reading?

I finished up Alan Cleaver’s The Postal Paths last night. It’s part history (about postal workers, mostly rural postal workers) and part memoir about walking, and it’s a bit too much of the latter for me at times. The author gets a bit sanctimonious about the virtues of walking and hand-writing letters at times, which was a bit annoying, too. I’m going to review it for Postcrossing, where I’ll probably be a touch more positive about it — but on a personal level, not a huge fan.

What are you currently reading?

I started Laura Spinney’s Proto yesterday, so that’s the book at the top of the pile! It’s a history of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of many modern languages, and it’s… okay. As usual, I long for numbered footnotes, and it’s less about the language itself than the speakers of the language. It feels like it sometimes goes too long without tying back in to the actual topic, but I’m enjoying it enough to keep reading. I hope it gets a bit more solid and specific about Proto-Indo-European itself, though.

What will you read next?

As ever of late, that’s a bit up in the air. I might just return my attention to something I had already started reading, like Noah Whiteman’s Most Delicious Poison… or I might be tempted to start Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading. I picked it up to just read the first page to see if I was tempted to read it, last night, and almost made myself late for bed, so that might be a good sign for my current interest in it! I do try to follow that kind of whim.