That’s it from me for the week. Annie Reid takes over most Fridays, and she’ll be around tomorrow if her WASP Holiday (TM) has run its course.

Thanks to your book recommendations — which I’m slowly digesting, responding to, and saving for a massive post — tonight I handed A. copies of Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Last night she and I lay side by side on the fold-out couch her with our separate books. I polished off Jean Rhys’ exquisitely tragic Wide Sargasso Sea, a retelling of Jane Eyre that focuses on the madwoman in the attic rather than Jane and the older Mr. Rochester. A friend has been urging me to pick it up for months, and now that I’ve heeded her advice I’ll be evangelizing to everyone I know.

A. read City of the Beasts, my impulse choice in the middle-grade section at a local bookstore last week. (Until then, I didn’t know Isabel Allende wrote for a younger audience. I wonder how many readers of literary fiction, puzzled by their children’s love for Harry Potter, seize on the Allende titles after picking through a hundred preteen fantasy novels with similar dark forest images on the cover.)

Have a good weekend.