Spoiler Alert: I haven’t finished reading any books in the past week. But here I am with another Wednesday reading update anyway…

This meme was formerly hosted by MizB at A Daily Rhythm and revived on Taking on a World of Words. All you have to do is answer the three questions below and leave a link to your post here for others to read.

The three questions:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

What are you currently reading?

Too many things.

What did you recently finish reading?

I recently read “Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead?” (written by Casey Cep) in The New Yorker, and while I never usually share my impressions of articles and media that are not behind a paywall (you may be able to access it if you are not out of free articles, or, of course, if you’re also a subscriber), I was totally captivated by it. The history of spiritualism, seances, and spirit photography (this was a new historical concept/endeavor to me) is quite fascinating, but I wanted to mention one of the other main features of this article – a new book from Emily Midorikawa. Here’s the summary for Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice.

Out of the Shadows tells the stories of the enterprising women whose supposedly clairvoyant gifts granted them fame, fortune, and, most important, influence, as they crossed rigid boundaries of gender and class as easily as they passed between the realms of the living and the dead. The Fox sisters inspired some of the era’s best-known political activists and set off a transatlantic séance craze. While in the throes of a trance, Emma Hardinge Britten delivered powerful speeches to crowds of thousands. Victoria Woodhull claimed guidance from the spirit world as she took on the millionaires of Wall Street before becoming America’s first female presidential candidate. And Georgina Weldon narrowly escaped the asylum before becoming a celebrity campaigner against archaic lunacy laws.

Drawing on diaries, letters, rarely seen memoirs and texts, Emily Midorikawa illuminates a radical history of female influence that has been confined to the dark until now.

Sounds cool, right? If you think you might also want to seek out this book for yourself, click here.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Who knows?! Based on my previous weeks of reading, nothing. But I’m hoping [once again] that I will get back on the right reading track before the next WWW Wednesday.

Did you answer the three W’s this week? Feel free to link your WWW Wednesday post below or just share which book(s) you’ve started the month with.

Happy reading!