What I'm reading Wednesday...

Fifteenth finish of the year.

At just eleven pages, this wasn't really long enough to count as a book, but I'm going to, because it's been on my Kindle for a loooong while waiting to be read, and because it was delightful!  We all know the story, but Diane Setterfield (whose books I have really enjoyed as well) added her usual quirky vibe to the classic fairy tale.  Loved it!

It's only available on Kindle, and it's FREE.

Sixteenth finish of the year.

Very interesting book, written by an autistic boy, Naoki Higashida, in Japan when he was 13 years old (he is now 32).  Each 'chapter' was headed by a question that people have about autistic children, such as "Why don't you make eye contact when you're talking?"  He painstakingly constructed his responses using an alphabet grid.  The book was translated from the Japanese by KA Yoshida and David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas).

Refuge by Dot Jackson

Now I am reading Refuge.  It has been on my Kindle for almost five years.  If I had known how good it would be, I'd have read it right away.

Mary Seneca Steele is born in Charleston in the early 1900s.  Her father is a kind and intelligent man, who delights in his daughter and playing his fiddle.  Sadly, when she is still a young child, he dies.  Her mother is somewhat distant, and 'Sen' ends up marrying into a neighborhood family, and her abusive husband depletes her inheritance and keeps on spending.  The very day in 1929 that he came home in a new car, she waits till he is asleep and escapes with their two children in the new car.  

She drives to find her father's family in the Blue Ridge Mountains that she knows only from her father's stories.  

I'm about a third of the way through, and loving it.