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Seattlest finally got around to reading Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. It's been on our "to read" list for, oh, about eight years now. more ›

Seattlest took a course at our liberal arts college in Chicago that had as its text The Journals of Lewis and Clark. We can't remember the name of the course or the instructor's name, but, our school being what it was, the class was probably for math credit. We were young and our mind was still impressionable, so the instructor's passion for the material infected us and for a long time afterwards we reserved a place in our literary heart for the Journals. In fact, it still sits on Seattlest's bookshelf. It's one of the Bernard Devoto editions from the fifties and Roxanne Rutledge wrote her name inside the front cover sometime before we purchased it for $2.70. It shows how highly we regard it as a text when we say that we've actually reread the thing. Multiple times. The instructor steeped us in the romance of heading West with nothing but a boat full of shiny things and a brutish companion (Clark, we were always Lewis, her sensitive mastermind) and, well, here we are. We didn't find the waterway either. Still, it's the ultimate backpacking trip (not that anyone cares about backpacking anymore, according to this week's Seattle Weekly). more ›