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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.1: Jennifer Weiner, Where’d You Go Bernadette, and Arctic explorers

At last, at last, the promised podcast commences! Welcome to our inaugural (and slightly disorganized) Reading the End Bookcast (with the demographically similar Jennys). You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go.

Episode 1

Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes.

If you want to skip around, here are the contents of the podcast:

Starting at 0:43 – Jennifer Weiner and Claire Messud are NEMESES. (NB they are not actually nemeses) Here is the (Publishers Weekly, not New Yorker! sorry, I got that wrong) interview in which Claire Messud is asked about whether you’d want to be friends with her protagonist. Here is the follow-up in which Claire Messud says the annoying thing about serious endeavor. Here is Jennifer Weiner’s response, and here is the history of Jennifer Weiner’s literary fights.

We also talk about the VIDA study about the presence of women in literary review sections of various periodicals. The 2012 study can be found here, if you don’t mind being made depressed.

Starting at 16:20 – We discuss the interactive webseries Welcome to Sanditon, by the creators of the marvelous Lizzie Bennet Diaries. You may notice a change in sound quality — that’s because we recorded this segment later, after we had acquired our fancy microphones.

Starting at 22:55 – We review Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Book Depository, B&N, Amazon), a book we both adored. I confirm herein that the author, Maria Semple, is indeed a TV writer but appears to have been a producer, and not a writer, on Arrested Development.

Starting at 34:10 – In the midst of reviewing Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Whiskey Jenny takes a beat to tell us some fun information about polar explorers. Specifically, Ernest Shackleton.

Starting at 37:49 – We recommend books to each other for the next podcast. We had this idea that we would review two books per podcast, but that turns out to be tricky, so we’ve given it up (for now). Our recommendations:

Starting at 45:27 – Closing remarks and outro

If you wish to get in touch with us to make recommendations or ask questions, we would be delighted to have you do so! Get in touch with us at readingtheend (at) gmail (dot) com. WE LOVE QUESTIONS. Also comments. Also recommendations.

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: andreybl / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
Song is by Jeff MacDougall and comes from here.
The above links to books we’ve discussed are affiliate links. If you click on them and then buy a book from that website, I get a very small amount of money. This in no way influences my reviews.