M. Coy Books on Pine is closing, and, because we spent hours and hours there as a teenager without buying anything, we're feeling a bit jerk-ish for not having patronized the place more in adulthood. more ›

tomorrow night. So excited, in fact, that we thought we'd go to the Google to find out what sorts of happenings are going to, well, happen tomorrow in celebration of the big release. more ›

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

We're pretty sure we stumbled across Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place at Bailey/Coy Books. It's been years since we first read it, and since then "You like mysteries? Have you read The Blue Place?" has been a regular part of our conversations. 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 ›

Behind perhaps only Andrew Sullivan (or Michael Musto if you live life through VH1) Dan Savage is our country's most prominent gay. From time to time in Seattle we may think of him merely as "that dude from The Stranger" but the guy is syndicated in a hell of lot of papers around the country, writes a decent book, and generally makes a lot of sense when he appears on television to discuss serious subjects. He's a National Voice, and we have precious few of those. Because of that, it is your civic duty as a bookish Seattleite to not only purchase Dan Savage's new book "The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family," but to attend his reading tomorrow night at Bailey/Coy Books. more ›