»The Client

On a rainy Saturday in Pittsburgh*, I raided a friend's bookshelf and came up with a comfortably worn paperback of John Grisham's The Client. I read it the rest of the day as I shuttled back and forth on the bus and subway, and came close to completion overnight while watching the time change. This morning, as I waited for a car to take me to the airport, I raced to finish the book: "Okay, 30 pages, about half an hour." I could so do that. And then I realised, as I turned the last leaf, that a sheaf of pages had dropped from the cheap glue at the end of the binding, and I wouldn't finish the page-turner. Undaunted, I figured that the newsstands at the airport would have the book, and I could stand quietly in a corner and discover how Grisham, never the master of the powerful ending, wound up this book (which is quite good: Grisham writes great legal thrillers, much better than Scott Turow). Frustratingly, the three shops at the terminal had almost every other of his books (really: the one on the ground floor had almost a dozen thick paperback titles by him).
I was totally foiled, stymied, thwarted. And by the time I get to the library, I'll have forgotten all of the exciting action of the preceding 75 pages.

* Not really in Pittsburgh; I just really like the phrase, from one of P.G. Wodehouse's wickedly humourous novels. I wish I'd been reading Wodehouse instead.