Reading material

If you're like me, and you have a boring commute to work, it always helps to have some reading material on hand. For the past two weeks, I've been reading this book:

Palladio

It's a work of fiction about a kick-ass creative agency called Palladio and the adgrunts who work there. If I didn't know better, I would say this fictional agency was modeled after St. Luke's in the UK.

Click continue to read the book's cover flap description. *Please note* this isn't a plug to buy the book. I borrowed my copy from the library. If anything I would recommend you do the same, or steal it from a book store!

In a small, floundering town in central New York, Molly Howe grows up to be a seemingly ordinary but deeply charismatic young woman. As a teenager, she has an affair with a much older man - a relationship that thrills her at first, until the two of them are discovered and she learns how difficult it can be to get away with such a transgression in a small town. Cast out by her parents, she moves in with her emotionally enigmatic brother, Richard, in Berkeley, California. At her lowest moment, she falls in with a young art student named John Wheelwright. Each of them believes - though for very different reasons - that this is the love that can save them. Then Molly, after being called home for a family emergency, disappears.

A decade later, John has gone on to a promising career at a "cutting edge" advertising agency in New York. He seems on a familiar road to success - until he wanders into the path of Malcolm Osbourne, an eccentric advertising visionary who decries modern advertising's reliance on smirking irony and calls for a popular art of true belief and sincerity. Toward the end, Mal founds - and invites John to join - a unique artists' colony-cum-ad agency alled Paladio, in Charlottesville, Virginia. The risky. much-ridiculed venture brings them undreamed-of fame and influence. It also brings, literally to their door, Molly Howe.