WWW.WEDNESDAY

 

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

PS I can no longer participate in WWW.WEDNESDAY via that link because her blog won't accept Blogger comments. I mention this only to save you the frustration I experienced trying to link up.

1. What are you currently reading? Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardner by MC Beaton. Agatha Raisin went away on a solo vacation, hoping that absence from her neighbor, James Lacey, would make his heart grow fonder. Instead she returns to find a new woman in town, a divorcee named Mary Fortune, has displaced her! Mary is not only blonde and slender, she's adept at gardening, one of Robert's passions. So Agatha -- devious, prickly, delightfully human Agatha -- decides to take up gardening, too. She joins the local horticultural society so she can keep an eye on James and Mary.

But she hates gardening. She hates Mary Fortune. She hates to admit it, but what Agatha is longing for is a nice juicy murder that will remind James how much fun they had together investigating. Fortunately one of the denizens of her small town cooperates and turns up dead. So far, this "cozy mystery" (#3 in the series) is keeping me entertained.

2. What did you recently finish reading? Teammate by David Ross. Timing is everything. Perhaps if I'd read this book in 2017, right after the Cubs won the Series, I'd have simply loved David's insider view of how my guys went from Lovable Losers to World Champions. Maybe I'd have felt nothing but delight when Rossy took me behind the scenes of Game 7 of the greatest baseball championship series ever. I could have just been happy for Ross, the back up catcher, who got a White House shout out from Barack Obama, appeared on Saturday Night Live and went on to Dancing with the Stars.

 

But now it's 2023. David Ross' paeans to his wife now sound like treacle because I know he left her in 2019 and went on to have a high-profile romance with an actress from Chicago Med, who says she dumped him because of his surreptitious use of dating apps. (Oh yeah, in the book he insists he doesn't even really know how what Instagram works. Glad to see you're more tech savvy now, David.)

So while the baseball stuff here is fascinating and his insights in sports and concussion protocol are fascinating, the tips on life and how to be a good teammate and better person were just annoying. I liked Joe Maddon's book better.

 

3. What will read next? A biography of President Eisenhower.