Weekly Finds 5/1/10

Two new ebooks this week.  I'm really starting to enjoy my Nook.  It's made me able to read a lot of things available to me that I probably wouldn't have read before, and I'm reading more since it is soo much easier to carry around than a stack of books.

Perdido Street Station

From the electronic overview:  Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia.  The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies,junkies, and whores.  In Now Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to non not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.

Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research.  But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faces with challenges he has never before fathomed.  Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.

While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention...

The Shop on Blossom Street

From the electronic overview:  Four lives knit together...

There a little shop on Blossom Street in Seattle called A Good Yarn.  You go there to buy knitting supplies and patterns - and now it's offering a knitting class.  The first lesson: how to knit a baby blanket.

For owner Lydia Hoffman, the shop represents her dream of beginning a new life free from the cancer that has ravaged her twice.  A life that offers a chance at love...and maybe marriage.

Jacqueline Donovan is stuck in a marriage that has dwindled to an arrangement of separate rooms and separate lives.  She disapproves of the woman married to her only son, but if she knits a baby blanket, she can at least pretend to like her pregnant daughter-in-law.

For Carol Girard, the baby blanket brings a message of hope as she and her husband make a final attempt at in vitro pregnancy.

And tense-looking Alix Townsend - that's Alix with an "i" - is learning to knit her blanket for her court-ordered community service...