WWW.WEDNESDAY

WWW.WEDNESAY asks us three questions to prompt you to speak bookishly. To participate, and to see how other book lovers responded, click here.

 

1. What are you currently reading?  

Y Is for Yesterday by Sue Grafton. Santa Theresa PI Kinsey Milhone is dealing with a thorny one. Parents hire her when their son is "timed out" of the juvenile penal system ... after murdering a classmate. But Kinsey recognizes that he was tried, convicted and served his time. This is the way the system works. She allows herself to be sucked into the family's drama. 

I'm not very deep into the story yet, but there is one thing I appreciate so far. Kinsey doesn't like the family she's working for. But they aren't asking her to do anything illegal -- at least not yet -- and their money is good. I'm not a private investigator but I work for an agency that assigns me to clients. I don't have to like them. This is life for us workaday stiffs.

 

PS I got this as a gift last Christmas, but I just couldn't read it then. I knew it was last Grafton, my last encounter with Kinsey, and that finality made me too sad.

2. What did you recently finish reading?  

And the Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi and Bruce Henderson. This is really two books in one, and I enjoyed the first one thoroughly. It takes place on Palmyra, a tiny island south of Hawaii. It's officially "unoccupied," meaning no one lives there -- though US Navy personnel and conservationists stay for short periods. It's on this virtually deserted island that two couples meet. The first couple, Buck and Jennifer, show up on Palmyra in an old boat they rehabbed themselves. They're trying to live off the land, in hiding because Buck is evading law enforcement. The second couple, the Grahams, swoop in on their luxury sail boat, looking for adventure.

 

Somehow, Buck and Jennifer show up back in Hawaii onboard the Grahams' boat, and the Grahams are never seen alive again. What happened?

The second story is Jennifer's trial, with Vincent Bugliosi defending her. This is when it drags. Bugliosi and Henderson give us some great moments -- Vince describing voir dire was genuinely enlightening, and the passages describing one of the witnesses (the woman who discovered Mrs. Graham's remains), made me smile because he was so twitterpated by her. But murder trials are long, and this level of detail was mind numbing.

 

Plus there are very few good photos in the book. Jennifer is depicted as warm, attractive and able to charm anyone. Yet there's only one grainy picture of her. It's frustrating.

 

3.  What will you read next?  
Fiction? A biography?

I choose to think of it as free food

Seven working days ago, we got a new assignment. A big assignment. I asked my boss what I should do about it.

"Just don't worry," said my distracted boss. It's a high profile project, so he wanted to maintain control. He was finishing off another project, though, and there were more hiccoughs on that one than he expected.

And he took last Friday off as a vacation day. Oh! He's taking all next week off, too.

So, when he dumped it all on me Monday, after a week, I was naturally resentful. I could have been working on it all along, but he waited to hand if off to me until it was late.

I was short-tempered and tense all day today. The account team I'm working with is less than competent but more than dramatic. Having to work through lunch while sitting out in the open with no privacy, no alone time, didn't help. Tomorrow will be more of the same, since we have a noon meeting scheduled.

Then it occurred to me: I've been eating free.

Monday, on my way out the door, I wrapped a giant deli sandwich and slipped it into my briefcase. It had been left over from conference earlier in the day. It made the main course of a decent dinner.

Today, one of my coworkers who felt bad about the situation alerted me that catering left a tray in the kitchen. I cadged a pair of meatballs and some green bean casserole.

Tomorrow's lunch meeting will actually be catered.

Is my boss taking advantage of me? Undoubtedly. Am I angry? At times.

But I choose to look at is free food.