Reading this for my next book club meeting... It's a story from the perspective of the "mad woman in the attic" in Bronte's Jane Eyre. Sounds like a great read.

Quoted: Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell.

Oh man...

Quoted: The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.

Can't believe there'll never be another book by David Foster Wallace. So sad :(

Quoted: After David Foster Wallace became a twentysomething literary phenomenon - after the publication of his first novel ("The Broom of the System," 1987) and short-story collection ("Girl With Curious Hair," 1989) got the Thomas Pynchon comparisons flowing - he checked himself into a hospital and asked to be put on suicide watch.

My latest blog post about Seattle's book industry...

Quoted: Seattle Newcomer Examiner - Nancy Pearl, Seattle-based founder of Book Lust, has put the city's literary scene on the map. And as she noted in the New York Times, thanks to the impact of local companies like Amazon, Costco and Starbucks, "New York may publish the books, but Seattle significantly defines America’s reading list.”

I agree - Anne of Green Gables is as good as Huck Finn in a lot of ways. I also think it didn't get the respect it deserves is because it featured a female protagonist...

Quoted: One hundred years ago, L.M. Montgomery did for women's imaginative lives what Susan B. Anthony did for women's political lives by publishing Anne of Green Gables, the story of an outspoken red-haired orphan growing up on Canada's Prince Edward Island.

Holy crap, Meryl Streep makes an amazing Julia Child! I can't wait to see this movie... I loved Julia Child's memoir - so inspirational. She didn't even start cooking seriously until her late 30s and she failed plenty of times. Fabulous life.

Quoted: The film also covers the years Julia Child and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) spent in Paris during the 1940s and ’50s, when Paul was a foreign diplomat who was eventually investigated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

This book sounds really cool - this is something I've actually often wondered about...

Quoted: First published in 1945 and about to be reissued in the NYRB Classics series, it is an epic account of how just about everything in America—creeks and valleys, rivers and mountains, streets and schools, towns and cities, counties and states, the country and continent itself—came to be named.

Oh man, another blog I wish I had created - it's a listing of amazing, beautifully illustrated books for children and adults.

Quoted: All ad revenue goes directly to buying new books to feature on the blog.

My International Examiner review of Raj Patel's book about the global food crisis!

Quoted: The global food crisis certainly isn’t starved for media attention. Turn to any news organization and rising food prices are making headlines alongside the rising cost of gas. With all the recent coverage, it seems like a problem that came out of left field.