This could have turned out better, I think

So despite my best intentions or at least my mediocre intentions I didn't manage to get any work done yesterday until about nine in the evening due mostly to my delightful morning with Ethan (it's always so exciting when we actually go on a date) and lunch and then finishing a book and a too-long nap and then dinner and gun-building. Yes, I now have my pathetic 5-lb weights to haul around and keep the gun show running a bit longer. I really need something a bit heavier but the 20-lb ones Ethan has are too much. But the moral of the story is the finished book - finally I regress back to indulgent sloth (is there another kind?) and retreat to my bedroom with the last twenty pages of The Coffee Trader by David Liss, my most recently began Powell's exploit. The book was fine, generally, not the sort that really grabs you with its wit or language or even characters. Mostly I kept reading out my overwhelming desire to know how stories end (this unfortunately applies to really bad movies also) and curiosity about the level of intrigue. The story is set in 17th century Amsterdam (also interesting to me for familial reasons now) which was a remarkably free society for early Europe and follows a Jewish Portuguese refugee (from the Inquisition) who is a futures trader who has been recently ruined and tries to scheme his way back to wealth through the new commodity of coffee. I do have some passive economic and business interests and am a sucker for historical novels (although that phase mostly ended when I turned 12) but really it was the question of deception that tied the novel together. Miguel never knows whom he can trust or should trust and as the reader there isn't any additional information. That hook was enough, although it took about a week to read the whole thing which tells you the worm wasn't the freshest wriggling sort of animal. I'm glad it's done - I can't quite decide what to pick up next.