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? The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene. Yes, I'm revisiting the first Nancy Drew book! Country Dew said she'd reread them recently, and I'm following her lead.

 

Shit just happens to Nancy Drew. She's motoring up the road in her blue convertible, a gift from her doting father (esteemed lawyer Carson Drew) when she encounters little Judy, a young girl who needs rescuing. She returns Judy to her guardians, a pair of elderly aunts, the Hoover sisters. Not only are the Hoover sisters broke and worried about how to provide Judy with the education she deserves, they have just been robbed! Wait, there's more. The Hoovers share with Nancy that their cousin, Josiah Crowley, the recently-deceased richest man in town, had promised to include them in his will and didn't. 

Who stole the sisters' stuff? Why would Old Man Crowley renege on his promise? If she doesn't get to the bottom of this, her name isn't Nancy Drew!

 

I'm having fun with this book, and remembering the 7-year-old Gal who first read it.

2. What did you recently finish reading? Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry. Wow. This memoir is scorchingly candid. There are times in this book when Matthew Perry admits to being selfish, insensitive, indulgent. He also acknowledges how much he threw away. During the run of Friends he got A-List movie roles and was compared to Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis (two other fast-talking sitcom actors who transitioned to the big screen). After Friends he was able to get three (3!) TV series "green lighted" by the networks. He had affairs with important, consequential women (Julia Roberts, Jamie Tarses) and countless girls who loved him. It all evaporated because of drink and drugs. As he says more than once, as an explanation and not an excuse, his body was trying to kill him.

It's sad, it's honest, and it's very funny, because Matthew Perry has a great deal of Chandler Bing in him. This is the book I wish Jenny Lawson had written, for the humor here is organic, not forced.

3. What will read next? Capote's Women by Laurence Leamer. I want to be done with it before the miniseries airs.