WWW.WEDNESDAY

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

• What are you currently reading? After Visiting Friends by Michael Haney. It's a pleasure to read this memoir by a journalist who is following in the footsteps of his father, a Chicago newspaperman who died at age 35 "after visiting friends." The family legend and the published obit just don't make sense to the author and he's on a quest to find out what really happened to the father he lost when he was just six. It's well written and moving and filled with details about Chicago that I recognize and that warm my heart.

 

• What did you recently finish reading? Top Down by Jim Lehrer. I really didn't like this book very much, whichis surprising because so much emotion is inherently part of the story. It's about a fictional Secret Service agent who made the decision on 11/22/63 -- the plastic bubble top stays down and President Kennedy rides through Dallas in a completely open car. Except that decision wasn't really that fateful, since the bubble top wasn't bullet proof and all the dialog is stilted and few of the characters made any real sense to me. This from a reporter who covered JFK's arrival in Dallas and went on to become half of the world-famous MacNeil/Lehrer Report! I was very disappointed.

• What do you think you’ll read next? The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O'Brien. A novel about a pair of Irish schoolgirls set in the 1940s. I began it a couple weeks ago and was enjoying it. I'll return to it after After Visiting Friends.

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