This week, the demographically similar Jennys are here to talk about J. K. Rowling’s excited new pseudonym, discuss things we’re willing to stand in line for, review Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository), PLAY A GAME, and update you on a new polar explorer we read up on! You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go.
Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We will appreciate it very very much).
If you want to skip around, here are the contents of the podcast:
1:15: Slander. I have not been trash-talking Whiskey Jenny all week (or at all).
Starting at 1:30: J. K. Rowling has published a book under a pseudonym! We discuss this thrilling news; weirdly elaborate fictional author bios; the lack of intrigue in the publishing profession; and whether Rita Skeeter is worse than Snape (she is not).
(6:24 – 6:32: Harry Potter spoiler. But you should already have read these books, for real.)
Starting at 7:38: We talk about things we’re willing to stand in line for. Yeses include concerts, select food items (but we don’t really know which ones), and sporting events. Noes include cronuts. Hell with you, cronuts. Nobody needs you.
Starting at 14:46: We review Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository), a book I have been excited to talk to Whiskey Jenny about for over a month now. I was worried that she wouldn’t like it (I can’t always predict her reading tastes), but as you will hear, she loved it! The Terry Gross interview I mentioned can be found here.
Starting at 23:40: Some spoilers. It’s not an awfully spoilable book, I don’t think, but anyway, there are some things we talk about in this section that occur after the first quarter of the book. Which I guess counts as spoilers? As ever spoilers baffle me.
Starting at 32:47: GAME TIME! Randon (Captain Hammer) moderates this Sporcle quiz.
(38:54: Please recommend other books that take place in Afghanistan. I want to rectify this baleful state of affairs.)
Starting at 46:15: A polar explorers update (as proposed by Anastasia) on Robert Peary, the Ben Roethlisberger of polar explorers, which is to say, not the guy you’d take as a first or second draft pick in your fantasy polar exploration league, and also an awful person. The page of polar firsts on Wikipedia can be found here.
Starting at 57:13: Closing remarks and outro. If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, please send them to us at readingtheend (at) gmail (dot) com.
Note that the next podcast, which will be posted on 7 August, will be a VERY SPECIAL COMICS PODCAST. Randon and I will be discussing the enduringly wonderful Hawkeye comic by Matt Fraction and David Aja, as well as Brian Michael Bendis’s current run on All-New X-Men. We’d love for you to read along with us and send us your thoughts!
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.