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Maggie and Buttercup were wild about tea.

The word of the week, over there at Illustration Friday is “wild,” but all I could scare up was this docile boar, so he’ll just have to do.

Oprah’s Book Club is back with a new, more modern approach to the club. According to information released by Oprah herself, the club will be much more interactive online and will utilize all the social networking outlets like Twitter (using the hashtag #oprahsbookclub), Facebook, and Oprah.com. Oprah will be taking questions from readers online and using them in her July 22nd interview with Cheryl Strayed, author of WILD, the first pick of Oprah’s Book Club 2.0.

“I love this book,” Oprah writes in the July issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. “I want to shout it from the mountaintop. I want to shout it from the Web. In fact, I love this book so much and want to talk about tit so much, I knew I had to reinvent my book club.”

According to the New York Times, Oprah will bring back the sticker on the jacket of printed books and is expected to make several selections each year.

Bookfinds will be following the each and every move of Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 and will be reading along with everyone! Stay tuned for quotes, posts, interviews and more!

We could not be more thrilled about the return of the book club and are looking forward to the adventures ahead! So let’s get reading!

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

“A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I had once been” – Cheryl Strayed

Summary:

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.

Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

Cheryl Strayed discusses the experience of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, and the experience of writing about it almost two decades later.

This is my post for Wild :) a wild thing!! a rocking wild girl! I hope you all like her :)

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by Roberta Baird
A Mouse in the House

Rebecca OUP-US

Earlier today we had a post from the other side of the ocean about their new smoking ban. In keeping with the smoking theme, we have Mitch Earleywine author of Pot Politics, Mind-Altering Drugs and Understanding Marijuana writing for us today. While we don’t endorse the use of illegal substances we do think Earleywine’s point is important, that there are ways less harmful than smoking to use marijuana. Earleywine, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University at Albany, State University of New York has also worked for 14 years on the faculty at the University of Southern California.  He is a leading researcher in psychology and addictions. To learn more keep reading.

Arguments about recreational and medical use of marijuana often turn to discussions about the health of the lungs. Inhaling particles, toxic gases, and heat is never a great idea, but people who smoke marijuana (but not cigarettes) rarely experience serious lung problems. Theoretically, however, the potential for marijuana-induced pulmonary troubles seems high. As public service announcements consistently remind Americans, the smoke from the tobacco and marijuana plants are very comparable. Some carcinogens and irritants are more concentrated in marijuana smoke than tobacco smoke. In addition, many marijuana users inhale the smoke deeply and hold their hits for long durations, giving tars and other toxins a greater chance to deposit on lung tissue (For reviews, see Earleywine, 2005; Iversen, 2000). (more…)

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