WWW: Wednesdays

WWW: Wednesdays is hosted by MizB over at Should Be Reading. This is a weekly meme that I have been participating in for over a year now.

To play along just answer the following three questions....

*What are you currently reading?

*What did you just recently finish reading?

*What do you think you'll read next?

Current:
A Chapbook for Burned-Out Priests, Rabbis, & Ministers by Ray Bradbury: For Bradbury enthusiasts, religionists and nearly everyone else, here's a delightful scrapbook of poems and essays, familiar summations but no less vital from a brilliant young fantasist grown older but not old. A "fallen-away Baptist," Bradbury has found a faith localized in a man-centered universe. Without recourse to the stylistic mannerisms that have made him prey to parody throughout his long career, he preaches with heartfelt urgency a return to space as an antidote to war. In essays he reimagines his lifelong idols, George Bernard Shaw and Herman Melville (GBS as a potential fan of Singing in the Rain, the "only science fiction musical film"; Ishmael as space voyager). His poems, the bulk in free verse, are no less exhilarating and infectious. One opens with an "apeman" sketching "science fictions" on cave walls while another addresses the modern "dichotomy" between Einstein and Christ ("Try this for size;/ A bit of both?"). There is humor, insightful in "Eccentrics Must Truly Have Loved God. They Made So Many of Him" and playful in "Has Anyone Ever Seen Anyone Reading in the Christian Science Reading Rooms?" (He concludes with a poignant image of the ghost of "Mary Baker eddying/ In pools of liquid ectoplasm.../ Reading her own stuff.") Bradbury hails Shaw: "GBS!" The future will add: "Ray!"

Read Since the Last WWW: Wednesday (click on titles for review):
Detection Unlimited by Georgette Heyer
March Violets by Philip Kerr
Death of an Englishman by Magdalen Nabb
Middlemarch by George Eliot


Up Next:
Haunted Gound by Erin Hart
The High Crusade by Poul Anderson
Hide and Seek by Wilkie Collins
Lucky Jim by Kinglsey Amis
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
Let's All Kill Constance by Ray Bradbury
Blood Atonement by Dan Waddell