WWW.WEDNESDAY

To participate, and to see how others responded, click here. 

1. What are you currently reading? Barbara Stanwyck by Al Diorio -- and I'm enjoying it. 

It's a perfectly serviceable movie star bio, the kind that publishers used to crank out to fill shelves back in the 1980s, when Crown Books and Borders anchored every mall. (Meaning: It's likely a combination archive interviews, news articles and press releases cobbled together with a touch of craft. It quotes conversations the author couldn't possibly have accurate knowledge of. ) 

Yet I'm enjoying it because it's all new to me. I knew Stanwyck's given name was Ruby Stevens, but   beyond that I knew little about her childhood. And it was a harrowing one! Born into poverty, she was orphaned at an early age and shuttled from foster home to foster home. She began working full-time at 14, first in offices, then in a chorus line and finally with a speaking part on Broadway.

So this Oscar/Emmy nominated legend of Old Hollywood almost literally created herself. Knowing this makes me appreciate her impressive body of work all the more.

2. What did you recently finish reading? Wanton's Web by Alex Matthews, a mystery set in Chicagoland, revolving around the murder of a high-paid call girl. Our sleuths are a psychologist who works from home and her lover, an investigative reporter for a fictional Chicago newspaper. 

It took forever for it get started! Maybe that's my fault -- I started the series at Book #4 and maybe the early chapters would have been compelling if I was familiar with the series regulars. But once it took off, it held my attention. There was a terrible inevitability to the mystery's resolution that was true to the victim and the life she chose.

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