AUSSIES IN THE HOUSE: The Waifs are so much fun live. There's just something about families that sing together—you can't get that kind of synchronicity from strangers. The Australian sisters and their male guitarist compatriot are one of the most delightful folk-pop bands around, and their live energy is undeniably infectious. Catch them tonight at that swanky joint, the Triple Door. more ›

The book: Pauls Toutonghi's novel Red Weather. more ›

This month Seattlest Book Club is reading Seattle-born and -raised Pauls Toutonghi's debut novel Red Weather, just out in paperback from Random House. You'll get a discount if you buy it at Bailey-Coy or Santoro's. more ›

THIS MONTH we've been talking about Seattle author Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time. We went over the big plow-up of the prairie, the hard-scrabble living, and Egan's decision to tell the story novelistically, rather than textbookily. more ›

Off to the right there is our dad's family. It's 1934, Kansas. They've been beaten by the dust storms. They're all packed up and headed to Arkansas, where they'll last two weeks. They'll stop on the White River, contract malaria from mosquitoes, and trek back to Kansas. They'll only survive because our grandfather will get $1 a day from the government for grading the dust dunes left after storms into elevated roads. more ›

Seattlest has been through our fair share of earthquakes, and while Jonathan Raban's book Surveillance gave us a quivering reminder of the Nisqually quake, we understood the optimism inherent in his ending. Seattle is still there; shaken, likely forever changed, but still there. We know quakes can be insanely devastating, but they don't scare us nearly as much as what we discovered in grad school in central Illinois: tornadoes and wind storms. The first time we set foot in the plains outside Champaign-Urbana, we were gripped with a paralyzing terror that we would simply float up off the planet, untethered by mountains, water...hell, even a small hill would have helped. Our brain would conjure far-off mountain ranges from cloud formations, and we would engage in the explicit delusion that they were indeed there, comforting us with their solidity, mass, and means of escaping the never ending flatness. We lasted a mere three and a half years there, and ran screaming back to the West Coast. more ›

We're going to spoil the end of Jonathan Raban's Surveillance. If you haven't read it yet and don't want to know, stop reading now. more ›

Jonathan Raban's Surveillance is the first book in Seattlest's Book Club. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't forget to ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount at Santoro's Books in Greenwood and Bailey-Coy Books on Capitol Hill. more ›

Well, we're finished with World War Z, which means we'll finally have time to pick up Jonathan Raban's Surveillance and that some lucky souls at the library will move up a notch on the hold list. Surveillance, of course, is the first book in Seattlest's Book Club. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't forget to ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount at Santoro's Books in Greenwood and Bailey-Coy Books on... more ›

The first rule of Seattlest Book Club is you have to read the book. more ›

This week's weather was beautiful, enough to justify Seattlest's first bbq of the year. But it's going to be a wet weekend, according to KOMO-TV's Scott Sistek. How will Seattlest keep dry? Read on... more ›

"Hey guys my name is vern. I am a Writer who is trying to go clean after a life of crime, alcohol, etc." more ›

Seattlest loves it when huge local retailers start getting into what those in the content business call "the content business." You may remember reading our post about Starbucks and Hollywood recently. To paraphase ourselves we weren't very excited about it. Kind of ambivalent and not really expecting much from it. Amazon.com and Starbucks are two different creatures, though, and when we heard yesterday that Amazon would be launching a show of its own we were a bit less skeptical. Amazon sells media, at least, and not something that you drink. more ›