Waiting on Wednesday/WWW Wednesday

Waiting on Wednesday is a bookish meme hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.

My pre-publication pick this week is The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano.

The summary, via Publishers Weekly, via Amazon:

Italian author and mathematician Giordano follows two scarred people whose lives intersect but can’t seem to join in his cerebral yet touching debut. Alice and Mattia, both survivors of childhood traumas, are the odd ones out amid the adolescent masses in their high school. Mattia has never recovered from the loss of his sister, while Alice still suffers the effects of a skiing accident that damaged her physically and stunted her ability to trust. Now teenagers, Mattia, also addicted to self-injury, has withdrawn into a world of numbers and math, and Alice gains control through starving herself and photography. When they meet, they recognize something primal in each other, but timing and awkwardness keep their friendship on tenuous ground until, years later, their lives come together one last time. Giordano uses Mattia and Alice’s trajectory to ask whether there are some people—the prime numbers among us—who are destined to be alone, or whether two primes can come together. The novel’s bleak subject matter is rendered almost beautiful by Giordano’s spare, intense focus on his two characters.

This sounds like a really impactful, character-driven novel, but probably not one you want to read on a rainy day. The Solitude of Prime Numbers comes out in the US on March 18. Thanks to Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea for introducing me to this one! (Her review of it is here.)

Next meme! WWW Wednesdays are hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading. To play along:

What are you currently reading?

What did you recently finish reading?

What do you think you’ll read next?

What are you currently reading? Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters. I’ve got about 15 pages left and it’s killing me. Expect my review to be unprecedented (for this blog, anyway) gushing. An aside: I was reading this in my work building’s lunchroom the other day, and my boss strolled by and did a double-take. “You’re not going to believe this…” she said, before whipping a copy of Fingersmith out of her own backpack! That’s right: we’re reading the same book at the same time, without ever indicating anything about the book to one another previously! Love my boss.

What did you recently finish reading? The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman. It was a good, thought-provoking read. I like when sci-fi reflects some aspect of our society–in this case, how war affects the soldiers fighting it, isolating them from the very people they’re fighting to protect. I wrote about The Forever War in my last WWW Wednesday post! Also, the Sassy Brit used it was her Friday Find last week with a nice little shout out to me. 🙂

 

What do you think you’ll read next? Depends what I get in the mail! 😉 I was hoping to get my package from Better World Books by today, but it doesn’t look like it’s made it yet. Suggestions?