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.
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.
