Yesterday British Airways 0870 850 9850 launched another seat sale this time focusing on North America – and allowing travel until

Yesterday, British Airways (0870 850 9850) launched another seat sale, this time focusing on North America – and allowing travel until the end of April. Destination of the week: Seattle
Yesterday, British Airways (0870 850 9850; ) launched another seat sale, this time focusing on North America – and allowing travel until the end of April. Many of the fares look attractive: £219 return from London-Boston, and £269 to either Los Angeles or San Francisco. But these are all highly competitive routes, where low fares are commonplace. One that isn’t is Heathrow-Seattle, on which BA has a monopoly. The return fare of £299 is substantially lower than normal – and as evidence of how good, it is £110 cheaper than the special to Vancouver, just across the Canadian border.You must book these fares by 8 March, complete travel by 30 April – and avoid the Easter “blackout” from 17-24 March.Warning of the week: forest fire in ChileA careless Czech camper whose stove tipped over has started a huge forest fire in the Torres del Paine National Park, one of the most beautiful parts of South America.

At the moment, people look at you as though you’re crazy if you leave a book. My sister has been chased down a train by someone wanting to give it back.”BRITAIN’S MOST CROSSED BOOKS1 The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown 7192 The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold 7073 Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown 6264 A Painted House, by John Grisham 5995 Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Rebecca Wells 5426 The Firm, by John Grisham 5297 The Pelican Brief, by John Grisham 5298 A Time to Kill, by John Grisham 5139 The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd 48710 Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton 477. A friend asked if I had heard of bookcrossing.After I’d had my son, my friend gave me a book with a label on it Now I get release alerts when there is a book in my area. My friend has set up a Yahoo bookcrossing group and people use the message system to ask one another if they have a particular book on their shelf. I have gone from reading two books a year to well over 200 last year. It’s helped me find books I would never have read and introduced me to authors including Margaret Atwood and Joanne Harris.”I do ‘wild-release’ books but in Hull it’s not really taken off yet.

I’ve been bookcrossing for two years and I’ve never found a book.”I have wild-released lots and it’s really exciting – one has now ended up in Portugal I hope there will be more people doing it. It’s found me books I would never have seen’ Zoe Ashton-Worsnop, a 29-year-old mother from Hull, started bookcrossing two years ago.”I was in hospital just before I gave birth to my son and I was really bored I used to read a lot, but I hadn’t read for a long time. On Thursday, passengers on the 9am London to Nottingham train might have spotted a volume entitled Difficult Questions about Videogames. The book, rated nine out of 10 by a user named videokid, was “travelling” according to the website. There were 41 books in Newcastle upon Tyne for readers to pick up.Those passengers who were travelling through Haymarket Metro station could take home Buffy the Vampire Slayer – the Power of Persuasion by Elizabeth Massie, while people in the departure lounge at Newcastle airport were offered the Marriage Codes by Hewie Edward Dalrymple if they knew where to look out for it.’I read 200 books last year. But Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller and a member of the judging panel that selected the books featured on Page Turners, believes the UK still has some way to go to catch up with America. “I don’t think bookcrossing has taken off as well as it has in the US There’s probably only thousands actively doing it.