"NC early voting outpaces 2008 turnout"

"The Moby Dick Big Read" (check out the link)

Free audio online. The 1st chapter is read by Tilda Swinton, and John Waters reads a chapter somewhere, and other folks . . .

From the site:

‘I have written a blasphemous book’, said Melville when his novel was first published in 1851, ‘and I feel as spotless as the lamb’. Deeply subversive, in almost every way imaginable, Moby-Dick is a virtual, alternative bible – and as such, ripe for reinterpretation in this new world of new media. Out of Dominion was born its bastard child – or perhaps its immaculate conception – the Moby-Dick Big Read: an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.

Got my tent packed and

my GF has packed some sandwiches and a cooler, and we are off to camp for a couple of days at the lake. I have a good book packed too. Anyone else enjoy getting away from everything as simply as possible? This pic from earlier this summer at the same place:

Great book: "Cheryl Strayed: 'Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail'"

(Edit: I probably shoud've posted this in non-fiction, but it's a good book, period.) I got the recommendation for it from a friend. Personally, I read more fiction than non-fiction, and I wasn't sure I'd like this book, but I found it extraordinary. Well-written and easy to connect with the author.

Here's a link to read more about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/books/wild-by-cheryl-strayed-a-walkabout-of-reinvention.html?pagewanted=all

From that link:

The clarity of Ms. Strayed’s prose, and thus of her person, makes her story, in its quiet way, nearly as riveting an adventure narrative as Jon Krakauer’s two “Into” books: those matey fraternal twins, “Into the Wild” and “Into Thin Air.”

Just curious--did you grow up in a house full of various books

and magazines and newspapers? I did, mostly because my mother was a high school and middle school English teacher so there were books her class was reading at the time. Plus, she just plain loved to read so there were always books and magazines about. Not cluttered, but plenty of things to read always. She even had several boxes of books in the attic from her high school and college days and she always let me go up there and see if I found any of those books interesting. I would bring those down to read (Great Expectations, Gone With the Wind, Robinson Crusoe, etc.) and I saw her handwriting and the notes she made to herself in her literature classes as a student. And we went to the library regularly too since as far back as i can remember as a child. I was very lucky in this way.

It still always seems weird to walk into someone's home and see no books on the shelves whatsoever. No magazines folded over where someone is in the middle of reading an article. So unlike how I grew up, or my own home now.

Louise Penny is my new favorite author (link)

I think I posted about her on the old DU, but I've now read all her books in her series and they just kept getting better, so I wanted to recommend them here, in case anyone was looking for a great new series of books to dive into. Here's a link to see what I mean (and if her books are your cup of tea): http://www.louisepenny.com/reviews.htm

Here are the books in order:
Still Life (2005)
A Fatal Grace (2007)
The Cruelest Month (2008)
A Rule Against Murder (2009)
The Brutal Telling (2009)
Bury Your Dead (2010)
A Trick of the Light (2011)

Cheers!
Lex