Jane Austen for the digital age

From Maureen Corrigan of NPR: "The Cookbook Collector is about all kinds of appetites — for love, and sex, and God and money, and, of course, food. The story revolves around two sisters: Jess, a beautiful 23-year-old graduate student in philosophy, hops impulsively from passion to passion. In contrast, we're told that Jess's older sister, Emily, is "possessed of a serene rationality." At only 28, Emily is the multimillionaire CEO of a dot-com startup. If that flighty sister vs. level-headed sister premise sounds familiar, it should. Goodman herself has called her latest novel "A Sense and Sensibility for the Digital Age." I confess, if anyone other than Allegra Goodman had made that claim, I very likely would have tossed my review copy away. But Goodman, as she always does, makes a believer out of this skeptic. Goodman says of one of her characters, a brilliant computer programmer, that "he had an acquisitive intelligence, and when he appropriated an idea, he improved it, until his own version ... obliterated its source." Of course, I wouldn't go that insanely far in praising Goodman's update of Austen, but I will say that this homage quickly comes to have a glorious life of its own." Check it out!