Wednesday, February 10, 2016

WWW.WEDNESDAY

WWW.WEDNESDAY is back! To participate, and to see how others responded, click here.

1. What are you currently reading?  Sinatra: The Chairman by James Kaplan. I just cracked it open Tuesday night at bedtime, so I shall have to reserve comment. But I dearly loved the first volume of Kaplan's epic Sinatra biography, so I'm really looking forward to finishing the story.

2. What did you recently finish reading? White Collar Girl by Renee Rosen. What an original little novel! Set in the Chicago Tribune newsroom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, it takes on sisterhood, changing women's roles, and in a neat but painful twist, resurrects the question raised to the women of Man Men: "Are you a Jackie or a Marilyn?"

It's also the story of a family grappling with loss. And it's a compelling look at the Chicago of those days, and the long-ago Richter scale scandals whose aftershocks we're still feeling today.

Something about it bugged me, though: poor fact checking. 
•  Working on one of her first news stories, our heroine visits a building in the 60610 zip code. Today that's the right code, but zips weren't used in 1959. 
•  One of the characters plays Tennessee Ernie Ford's hit "16 Candles" on the jukebox. The thing of it is, he had a hit with "16 Tons," not "16 Candles."

Disconcerting to encounter such sloppy editing in a story about a meticulous, ambitious girl reporter.

3.  What will you read next? I don't know.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous2:48 AM

    So annoying when there are those little errors; it can pull you right out of the story! I suppose a lot of people won't notice, but that shouldn't be an excuse.

    My WWW post is over here.

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  2. I added White Collar Girl to my TBR. ;-)

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  3. Anonymous12:57 PM

    I bet the author wasn't ready for someone who knew Chicago history as well as you. Happy reading and thanks for participating in WWW Wednesday!

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  4. Anonymous11:02 PM

    Aww, I hate when things don't add up. It takes away so much from the story. Hope your current read is better. Happy Reading.

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