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PODCAST, Ep. 117 – Anticipating the Backlist and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

This podcast is a sad news / glad news situation, because Whiskey Jenny couldn’t make it to recording this time, BUT we have a special guest, the marvelous Renay! We’re chatting about backlist books that we’re excited for, then reading one of the remaining books from Renay’s SF starter pack, Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you on the go!

Episode 117

Here are the time signatures if you want to skip around.

3:56 – What we’re reading
9:03 – What we’re listening to
15:44 – Backlist books we’re anticipating
39:21 – Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes

What we talked about:

Dune, Frank Herbert
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
Null States, Malka Older
The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls, Anissa Gray
Spin, Lamar Giles
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson
Larklight, Philip Reeve
Roboism and the Normie Toilet episode
Stay Tuned with Preet
Gastropod and the Eating to Win episode
the Austin 100
Kaia Kater
Darling West
Pop Culture Happy Hour
New Music Friday on All Songs Considered
Fonda Lee’s thread about Tolkien
To Shape the Dark, edited by Athena Andreadis
The Other Half of the Sky, edited by Athena Andreadis
The Empress Game, Rhonda Mason
Stuck in a Book
Tea or Books podcast
A Tale of Two Families, Dodie Smith
Cold Iron, Stina Leight
O Human Star, Blue Delliquanti
The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry
A Natural History of Dragons, Marie Brennan
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Megan Ellison
Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, William Wallace Cook
King’s Dragon, Kate Elliott
Luck in the Shadows, Lynn Flewelling
Gun Dealer’s Daughter, Gina Apostol
The Snow Queen, Joan Vinge
The Dragons of the Cuyahoga, S. Andrew Swann
Tales of Innocence and Experience, Eva Figes
Zoo City, Lauren Beukes
The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes
Broken Monsters, Lauren Beukes
Motherland, Lauren Beukes
Moxyland, Lauren Beukes

You can catch Renay on Twitter @renay or catch up with her Hugo-shortlisted blog, Lady Business, or her Hugo-shortlisted podcast, Fangirl Happy Hour.

Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry

Transcript

[THEME SONG] You don’t judge a book by its cover. Page one’s not a much better view. And shortly you’re gonna discover the middle won’t mollify you. So whether whiskey’s your go-to or you’re like my gin-drinking friend, no matter what you are imbibing, you’ll be better off in the end reading the end.

GIN JENNY: Welcome to the Reading the End Bookcast with the Demographically Similar Jennys. I’m Gin Jenny.

RENAY: And I’m Renay.

GIN JENNY: And we’re here again to talk about books and literary happenings. Renay, it’s so nice to have you on the podcast again!

RENAY: Yes, thank you.

GIN JENNY: Renay is a terrific friend who blogs at Lady Business—the again Hugo shortlisted blog Lady Business—and podcasts at the also Hugo shortlisted podcast Fangirl Happy Hour. We’re so excited to have her. Whiskey Jenny unfortunately could not make it this time.

On today’s podcast, we’re going to talk about what we’re reading and listening to. We are going to discuss some backlist books that we’re anticipating. And then we’re going to review Zoo City by Laura Beukes, which is one of the books on Renay’s SF starter pack that I haven’t read yet. So Renay, what are you reading?

RENAY: What do you mean you haven’t read it yet?

GIN JENNY: Right, yes, OK, yeah, mm-hm, yup, that’s a great point. I had not read it prior to this podcast, but now I have read it.

RENAY: OK. [LAUGHTER] Because I haven’t read it in like a year. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: It will just be me guessing. Yeah.

RENAY: It’d be the Zoo City Quiz. [LAUGHTER] As for what I’m reading, I have had this mission to get through Dune, by Frank Herbert.

GIN JENNY: Oh, bless your heart.

RENAY: Listen, when I was a kid SciFi, the channel, before they changed their name—

GIN JENNY: To SyFy.

RENAY: Yeah. They did a miniseries, a Dune miniseries. And so that’s the first version of Dune I ever saw, and I loved it.

GIN JENNY: How is the book comparing so far?

RENAY: So I’ve tried to read the book in hard copy. I’ve tried to read the book as an ebook. And I can’t. I can’t get through it. So I tried the audio book. And the audio book was finally working.

GIN JENNY: OK.

RENAY: And I got halfway through the book—

GIN JENNY: Uh-oh.

RENAY: And the author changed the characterization of a character completely in the span of a paragraph.

GIN JENNY: Oh no.

RENAY: Just oh, he could tell a magical fantasy story.

GIN JENNY: I really think, Renay, that it would be OK to just set Dune aside.

RENAY: Well, Jenny, you’re right, because I did. [LAUGHTER] After that moment listening to the audio book, I got so enraged that that happened that I was like, it’s official. I’m DNFing you. The miniseries is better.

GIN JENNY: I think that’s the right call. I started reading Dune one time on a camping trip. Not a real camping trip. A pretend camping trip where we had a cabin in a rustic setting, and we just made meals and read in the cabin all weekend.

RENAY: That’s a good trip.

GIN JENNY: Great trip. I’m really trying to get my family to reinstitute those trips because they were incredible. It’s the most conducive environment to enjoying a book that there is possible to have. And I still—I really liked Dune for about a quarter of the way. I powered through the second quarter. And then about halfway through, I got bored and DNFed it.

RENAY: Right?

GIN JENNY: Yeah.

RENAY: Yeah. It was just a super awful disappointment. I was like, I see why you were adapted to television.

GIN JENNY: So are you moving on?

RENAY: Well, yes. I’m moving on. But also, a slight rant. This is not science fiction. I don’t care if it’s set in space on another planet. It’s a fantasy novel. The way that the story is structured and the thing that the story is about, it’s a fantasy novel.

GIN JENNY: But not a good one.

RENAY: No! But this is like, best sci-fi of all time! Really? Because I have some thoughts.

GIN JENNY: It is neither best nor sci-fi, says Renay of Lady Business.

RENAY: Exactly. I did read some other things. I read A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle.

GIN JENNY: Still good?

RENAY: Yes. I still love it.

GIN JENNY: Great.

RENAY: The religious stuff is way more pronounced now for me. I finally can see it. I didn’t really get it when I was growing up, because I was a very secular child. But as an adult with some research and reading under my belt, I’m like, I see. I see what you’re doing.

GIN JENNY: Yeah.

RENAY: I don’t think it’s bad. I can just read it as fantasy. But it was a lot more overt than I remember. Anyway, I still love it. Meg is amazing.

GIN JENNY: Meg is a treasure.

RENAY: And I’m currently reading Null States, by Malka Older, which is the second book in her Centenal Cycle.

GIN JENNY: Right. The first one was Infomocracy, is that right?

RENAY: Yep. Which is up for a Best Series Hugo, too. I’m very excited. I love this series so far. It’s so good. I’m so sad I haven’t read it sooner.

GIN JENNY: Well, awesome. That’s so much better than stupid Dune.

RENAY: This is legitimate science fiction, unlike Dune which is illegitimate.

[LAUGHTER]

I’m so sorry. Do not send Jenny hate mail. You can just at me @Renay on Twitter and send me the hate mail.

GIN JENNY: I don’t think any of our listeners are going to send you hate mail. They’ll probably be like, you’re right, Dune is stupid.

[LAUGHTER]

RENAY: And that’s what I’ve been reading the last couple of weeks.

GIN JENNY: Awesome.

RENAY: What have you been reading, Jenny?

GIN JENNY: Well, I did readathon this weekend, so I read a bunch of stuff. But most recently today I finished reading The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls, by Anissa Gray, which is about these three adult sisters. And the oldest one, Althea, kind of raised the younger two. And she and her husband are sent to jail for, it sounds like charity fraud and maybe money laundering? I don’t really understand financial crimes. They go to jail for financial crimes. They deceived people and made them believe that they were doing charities, but actually they were just keeping the money people donated.

RENAY: So what you’re describing here is the American philanthropic sector. The entire thing.

[LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: Woo, viciously cynical. But anyway, so these two people go to jail, and the couple has two kids. So the younger two sisters have to care for the kids. And it’s about generational family trauma, and coming to terms with difficult relationships with family members. I thought it was really good. It’s a debut novel, and sometimes the pacing was a little choppy. But overall I thought it was really excellent. And I would be very interested to see what this author does next.

And then for something completely different, I am also reading Spin, by Lamar Giles, who has become one of my favorite YA authors. He writes these contemporary thriller mystery stories. And they’re just really fun. They’re just a lot of fun. This one’s about, a local DJ gets murdered. And her slightly estranged best friend and her like biggest groupie slash social media manager are the two people who find her. And they’re enemies, but they have to team up to solve her murder.

RENAY: Oh, a team up.

GIN JENNY: I love a team up! You know I do. So I’m not very far in yet. One of them just got kidnapped, so it’s looking to be classic Lamar Giles. I just really enjoy his books. They’re so suspenseful. They’re just really, really enjoyable reads, and I’m always excited when he has something new out.

RENAY: I got very excited when you said the word Spin.

GIN JENNY: Oh! [LAUGHTER]

RENAY: Because I’m like, did you stealth read one of science fiction novels on the list? No, you didn’t. This sounds awesome.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, no, it is. Yeah, the thing about Spin, there is another book called Spin that’s on the SF starter pack Renay gave us. And I actually own it. I have it in mass market paperback, but I find it kind of intimidating. And I’m nervous to read SF by white guys. So those are the two things that have been holding me back.

RENAY: You know everything that will be wrong with this book, based on the fact that it’s by a white guy.

GIN JENNY: OK.

RENAY: You can predict it going in. Prepare yourself, especially when it comes to women.

GIN JENNY: OK, good to know. Good to know. Well, I do own it. And I think it might be the last one that I haven’t read yet.

RENAY: Oh, wow.

GIN JENNY: You know what, that’s a lie, because I haven’t read Larklight.

RENAY: [GASP]

GIN JENNY: I know. So that’s what I have been reading. I’m sorry it’s the wrong Spin, but it’s a very good Spin.

RENAY: It sounds very interesting. Although I get really tense with thriller stuff like that. So I can’t do it with books, because then I’m like, is my door locked? I need to turn on the lights.

[LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: Did I say it was YA? It’s YA.

RENAY: So maybe it’s less suspenseful? In like a way that’s not going to terrify you so you can’t go to sleep at night?

GIN JENNY: That is the case for me, yes. I don’t know if that would be the case across the board. But I’m pretty cowardly, if that helps.

RENAY: Jenny, we both read White Tears.

[LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: That was so scary.

RENAY: I still sometimes think about that book and I get goose bumps.

GIN JENNY: Oh, I know. It gives me a shiver. Well, Renay, we had you pick out what we’re going to be something else-ing this week, and you suggested what we’re listening to. So what are you listening to?

RENAY: A butt-ton of podcasts.

GIN JENNY: Way to go.

RENAY: So there is a podcast called Roboism, it is two women, Savannah and Alex, talking about robots in popular culture.

GIN JENNY: I love two women talking about stuff podcasts.

RENAY: They talk about robots, artificial intelligence, machine learning, how things like AI and stuff affect our culture and society. And I’m going to sell this show to you by the episode that just had me on the floor rolling in laughter. It’s the episode where they talk about toilets.

GIN JENNY: I mean, I do love toilet humor. So I’m already pretty much sold.

RENAY: So the episode was called “Normie Toilet,” and they just talk about smart toilets.

GIN JENNY: I mean, that works. You’re correct. You’ve sold me.

RENAY: They’re so funny. And they curate all this news that I’m really interested in but don’t have time to curate myself, when it comes to robots and AI. So, highly recommend Roboism.

GIN JENNY: Awesome.

RENAY: I have also been listening to Stay Tuned with Preet. It’s a political podcast.

GIN JENNY: Oh sure, yeah.

RENAY: Jenny was like, why do you sound so dire?

GIN JENNY: I know!

RENAY: It’s a political podcast. And I think a lot of people might be burned out on politics right now, because as you know, we’ve been living in a hellscape for the last 864 years. Stay Tuned with Preet is by Preet Bharara. He was the attorney general in the Southern District of New York. He was made famous when he refused to quit and our president fired him. And then he went on to have his own podcast, which is actually as far as I’m going to go into listening to a both sides argument. Because he has a lot of older conservative men on. Not Republican conservative, just more reserved. He is a lawyer.

GIN JENNY: Sure, sure.

RENAY: So he has people who are more careful about what they say, more reserved. And that’s as far as I’m going to get to listening to the other side. That’s as far as I go.

GIN JENNY: Cool.

RENAY: Then I’ve also been listening to a podcast called Gastropod, which is actually not young. It’s been around for a while. It’s basically food through the lens of history and science concepts.

GIN JENNY: That sounds great. That sounds amazing.

RENAY: So my favorite episode that I’m going to use to sell this show—notice I didn’t recommend one to sell Preet’s show. Because you know what’s in there. —is the episode called “Eating to Win: Gatorade, Muscle Milk, and Chicken Nuggets,” which is about how athletes use food to improve their performance, and whether or not that food works, and how it’s changed over time. It was just a very interesting intersection of food history and athletic history. I was fascinated. It’s just an excellent, excellent podcast. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been listening to.

GIN JENNY: That all sounds great. I have been—unfortunately, we have reached the end of Bachelor season, and I no longer have Bachelor recap podcasts to listen to, which is so sad.

RENAY: Oh no!

GIN JENNY: I know. It’s such a nice escape from the real world. But instead of that, I’m listening to music again, which is great. Listening to new music. Every year NPR creates this playlist called the Austin 100 where they highlight 100 particularly excellent songs from that year’s South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin. And they make the playlist available to stream for free on a bunch of different services—Spotify, TIDAL, YouTube. So I’ve been listening to that.

And two new artists that I’ve found via that and now have been listening to more of their stuff our Kaia Kater, who does alt-folk music. She’s a biracial Grenadian-Canadian artist, and I really like her stuff. And Darling West, which is a group that does alt-country music. So I’m listening to those albums and really, really enjoying them. And that is what I’m listening to.

RENAY: Wow, that sounds really fascinating. I didn’t even know they did that list.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, I think I first encountered it when I was listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour, because one of the hosts of Pop Culture Happy Hour is one of the main, or maybe the main curator of the Austin 100 list. So he would always hype it up. So I’ve been listening to it for a couple of years now.

RENAY: I love a good list.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, me too. And it’s nice because it’s from a really wide range of genres. I think they do a good job of getting a lot of different types of music on there. So that does mean that there’s a lot of stuff that I’m not necessarily that into. But it’s also a good way to just expand your horizons and listen to stuff you wouldn’t necessarily listen to otherwise.

RENAY: I don’t know if you listen to All Songs Considered by NPR.

GIN JENNY: I have, but I don’t consistently.

RENAY: So I like to save up a month of them and then fast forward through their commentary just to listen to the songs that they sample. Because I have found some really excellent music through some of their recommendations.

GIN JENNY: That is excellent advice. I was trying to think of a polite way to—actually I was just going to lie and be like, oh yeah, maybe I’ll listen to that. But I was trying to think of a polite way to say that I don’t want to listen to the whole podcast. But no, your plan sounds brilliant.

RENAY: Yeah, I really just skip the talking.

GIN JENNY: It’s not because—I’m sure they’re interesting. I’m just not that interested in music commentary. It’s kind of wasted on me. That’s what I’ll say.

RENAY: Yes, it is definitely wasted on me. They have some of the most interesting conversations, and I’m just like, what the hell are you talking—what?

GIN JENNY: Yeah, I just lack the context to understand it.

RENAY: I just want a good song. I just want something that slaps. This is not for me. But I want the recs. Literally, I just wait until they have a whole month of new music Fridays, I guess is the episodes that I always listen to. And I just browse through it and see what I like. And sometimes they put it into the show notes. So you don’t even have to listen. You can just look up the artists and the songs that they feature on your own.

GIN JENNY: Well that is a brilliant idea. I’m definitely going to do that. Thank you.

RENAY: And mostly I suggest it because these guys are deeply into the music scene, so they have this wide scope and knowledge of the field. So that’s why. I’m sure there’s other recommendation sites out there, but I’m really bad at music, so I don’t know how to find them.

GIN JENNY: I’m so bad at music. I feel very intimidated by music people.

RENAY: Same. OK, continue.

GIN JENNY: OK. So that’s what I’m listening to. You proposed a brilliant topic for this podcast. We have been talking recently about—actually, Renay, I feel like you and I have been talking about this for a while, about how the book internet just seems to get more and more skewed towards brand new stuff. And it’s become harder and harder to discover books from the backlist even of authors that I already like, but especially authors that I’m not familiar with, it’s hard for me to find backlist books at all.

So to slightly correct that, we want to talk about some backlist books that we’ve heard about recently and are excited to read. And Renay, you have a very moderate and reasonable number of recs, right?

RENAY: Yes, I started at four and just kept going.

[LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: So I had a hard time with this. So Renay’s going to give two books for every one of mine. Know that I am embarrassed that I failed to come up with more.

RENAY: It’s hard.

GIN JENNY: It’s hard! It’s hard. It made me sad.

RENAY: If you don’t keep meticulous lists like I do—I have a whole spreadsheet. It’s a thing—it’s hard to find older stuff and remember it. Especially if you’re going into a bookstore, it’s 18 shelves of George R.R. Martin and 16 of J.R.R. Tolkien. Great! See you later. Somebody did a thread about this recently. I think it was Fonda Lee.

GIN JENNY: I think I saw that, yeah. And then she got a bunch of hate for not liking Tolkien enough or something.

RENAY: Listen.

GIN JENNY: I know. It was bullshit.

RENAY: Tolkien is fine, but he needs to sit down.

GIN JENNY: It’s not his fault. Tolkien stans need to sit down.

RENAY: OK, I accept your edit to my commentary. [LAUGHTER] The thing about bookstores is that I’m pretty sure that publishers pay for shelf space.

GIN JENNY: Certainly for the special displays they do, yeah.

RENAY: No, no. I think they pay for all of it. Maybe it works different.

GIN JENNY: I actually don’t know how it works.

RENAY: Me neither. So yeah, it’s hard to find older books and backlist titles.

GIN JENNY: And even independent bookstores, they have to skew to some extent towards newer stuff, because that’s what people are coming in to buy.

RENAY: So it’s just an awful catch-22.

GIN JENNY: Yes.

RENAY: I should probably read that book one day.

GIN JENNY: Oh, no, you’re fine. You’re fine. It was really mind blowing when I was in high school, but now that I’m not in high school, it’s—you’re fine.

RENAY: You know what I really want? A service that Jenny provides where we ask, should I read this book? And you provide a short summary on why we should not read this book.

GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER] I would totally provide that service.

RENAY: So since I have to go and talk about two books at a time because I was too excited about this list, my first book is To Shape the Dark. And it is edited by Athena Andreadis. It is an anthology of short fiction. It is a sequel, but not a sequel, a follow up, a companion to a book that came out even earlier than it called The Other Half of the Sky. I read The Other Half of the Sky. I had an existential crisis about it, because it made me feel so stupid.

GIN JENNY: Aw! But you’re so smart, so that’s ridiculous.

RENAY: The anthologies feature books about women in science fiction and science stories, doing science, being active agents in the narrative. This version has authors like Aliette de Bodard, Melissa Scott, Vandana Singh, and a lot of other authors I don’t know, which is why anthologies are good vehicles for discovery. Anthologies are the mix tapes of short fiction.

GIN JENNY: What a perfect analogy.

RENAY: The second book is called The Empress Game, and it’s by Rhonda Mason. It came out in 2015. It’s a science fiction novel that I have—listen, I have read half of this novel three times.

GIN JENNY: Is this a Dune situation where you just need a little nudge to DNF it?

RENAY: No. This is a conversation where every time I pick this book up and get halfway through it, something happens. The first time, I went to a political workshop in Texas. The second time, I joined a political campaign. The third time, November 2016 happened.

GIN JENNY: Yeah.

RENAY: This poor book. And the problem is that I love it while I’m reading it, and then something explodes. I feel like this poor book is cursed. But I’m going to finish it.

GIN JENNY: All right. I believe you. I trust you. I have faith in you.

RENAY: It is about a princess who suffered through a coup, and her whole family was killed except her and her brother. And she is hiding out on a planet by pretending to be a gladiator.

GIN JENNY: That sounds really cool.

RENAY: But then she makes a deal with some government agents, and then there are shenanigans.

GIN JENNY: Oh boy. I love government agents and machinations.

RENAY: And she has to pretend to be another person. [GASP]

GIN JENNY: [GASP]

RENAY: Yes.

GIN JENNY: Excellent. All right. So those are your first two?

RENAY: Those are my first two.

GIN JENNY: All right. So my first one, in December my pal Simon, who blogs at Stuck in a Book and has a wonderful and wonderfully British book podcast called Tea or Books, he reviewed a book by Dodi Smith entitled A Tale of Two Families. And Dodi Smith wrote I Capture the Castle, which is one of my favorite books of all time. I have read some of her lesser works, and none of them—they really are lesser works. None of them are as good as I Capture the Castle. None of them really even come close. Some of them are kind of fun, some of them are quite stupid. But I thought I had read all of them.

And then Simon reviewed this book called A Tale of Two Families that I’ve never heard of. And I was outraged that there was a book by her that I hadn’t heard of. It’s from the 1940s or 1950s, because that’s when she was writing. And then, by total chance, I happened to come across this book at a book sale like two months after Simon spoke of it. So I now own it. I don’t necessarily expect it to be any good, but I’m nevertheless extremely excited to read it. It’s just a nice feeling to read a backlist book by an author you like.

RENAY: There is a reason why I still have John Scalzi books that I have not read.

GIN JENNY: Oh, God, yeah. I often will save backlist books by authors that I like as a treat for myself for later, so that I’ll always have something to look forward to. And I didn’t think I had done that with Dodi Smith, but apparently I accidentally did.

RENAY: That’s a really good outcome.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, so I own it now, and I’m really, really, really looking forward to getting to it. All right, your go. What are you next two?

RENAY: Back to me with my endless list.

[LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: I love your endless list.

RENAY: So in 2015, Stina Leicht published an epic fantasy novel called Cold Iron. It was large. It’s like 600, almost 700 pages.

GIN JENNY: Oh wow, damn.

RENAY: And it’s about these two twins who have to deal with military and magical shenanigans in their kingdom. They go their separate ways, they take part in different factions. And it’s a huge book. I want to read it so bad.

GIN JENNY: I have had a really hard time finding time for huge books these last few years.

RENAY: That’s my problem as well.

GIN JENNY: Yeah. And I don’t know why.

RENAY: I think for me it’s because I feel guilty if I spend more than a week and a half on a book.

GIN JENNY: Me too. I feel like I should be finishing something and writing posts, et cetera, et cetera.

RENAY: And that’s not good, because with epic fantasy, you can’t.

GIN JENNY: Yeah. Well, that sounds really good. I love twins, and I love—as I’ve said like 16 times already on this podcast alone, I love machinations.

RENAY: Yeah. And one of the twins, Suvi, becomes an ally of pirates. So there’s pirates.

GIN JENNY: Oh, great. Great. You know the way to my heart.

RENAY: I’m just going to keep doling out crumbs. Come with me, Jenny, come with me.

[LAUGHTER]

So switching gears entirely, the next one is called O Human Star, volume one. It’s by Blue Delliquanti. This is a graphic novel. It’s about an inventor who set off the robot revolution, and then he died, so he didn’t get to see any of it. And then 20 years later, he wakes up inside his own robot body, and he comes back to the world to see what has changed. And the art for this is really pretty. I have both volume one and volume two. It is self-published. And it’s about robots, so obviously.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, right up your alley. That sounds really cool.

RENAY: And Blue Delliquanti comes to WisCon every year. And both years that I’ve gone to WisCon—I’ve gone twice—I have bought them, volume one and volume two. However, guess what I have not done.

GIN JENNY: Read them?

RENAY: Read them. So I’m determined to read them so I can go to her if she’s at the con this year and be like, [WHISPERING] I love your books.

GIN JENNY: I mean, that sounds—I love that premise. That is such a cool premise.

RENAY: Yeah. OK, you next.

GIN JENNY: All right, me next. My next one is The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry, which is kind of recent, but I’m counting it as backlist because she has a new book out, and this was several years ago. And I think it’s OK to include. It’s set in Victorian times, and it’s about a lady scientist who goes to Essex to try and find a sea monster there. And I don’t actually know if there is a sea monster in this book, but I’m choosing to approach it as if there were a sea monster and she’s going to find it.

RENAY: I love sea monsters.

GIN JENNY: I love sea monsters. And I also love Victorian lady scientists. They just had so much to struggle against. I can’t remember, do you like Frances Harding?

RENAY: I have never read Frances Harding. And I realize that now several of your listeners have had heart attacks. It’s not for lack of trying. I have two of her books on my shelf.

GIN JENNY: OK. So you’re halfway there.

RENAY: I’m halfway there. I just gotta read one. One is A Face Like Glass, and then another one I can’t remember the title of it.

GIN JENNY: So Cuckoo Song was the first book by her that I really loved, but The Lie Tree has a Victorian lady scientist, and I really, really dug it. It just really reminded me of how much I like Victorian lady scientists. Plus, I used to live in Essex, so I feel a personal connection to this particular sea monster. And also the cover is really beautiful. And if I like it, Sarah Perry has a new book out called Melmoth, which has an Oscar Wilde connection. So if The Essex Serpent is good, I have that to look forward to, as well.

RENAY: Neat.

GIN JENNY: Yeah.

RENAY: I’m going to keep my eye out for lady scientist books now.

GIN JENNY: Thank you. Yes, please. Oh my God, especially if it’s—I would also love a lady scientist of monsters. So magic lady scientist.

RENAY: Yes.

GIN JENNY: I know that I’ve just described those Marie Brennan books, and I didn’t really like those, and I’m really sorry. It seemed like they would be perfect for me, and I don’t know what happened.

RENAY: Oh no!

GIN JENNY: I know!

RENAY: Well mostly oh no because guess what’s the next book on my list.

GIN JENNY: Oh my God, you’re kidding!

RENAY: No, I’m not.

[LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: OK, hit it.

RENAY: K.J. has recced this to me multiple times, our friend K.J., mutual friend. A Natural History of Dragons, by Marie Brennan.

GIN JENNY: That’s hilarious.

RENAY: Which came out in 2013. It’s been on my list for a while now. And it seems like the thing that I would like. But I keep being hesitant, because I get really picky when it comes to Victorian narratives. So I think I’ve just been a little hesitant. But I should just give it a try. It’s fine. If I don’t like it, it’s not the end of the world. But I do find that funny.

GIN JENNY: That is hilarious. That is a wild coincidence.

RENAY: The universe is amazing.

[LAUGHTER]

After that, the next one is The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, by Meg Elison. This is a post-apocalyptic story where a fever killed a ton of the earth’s population, and it makes childbirth extremely dangerous. And this midwife has to make her way through the world where there are these awful clans of men trying to claim women, and people scrabbling for power. And it sounds really great. It was on the Tiptree long list.

GIN JENNY: Oh, that’s why it sounds familiar. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t remember how I had heard of it before.

RENAY: I think the reason that I didn’t read it initially is because it was published by 47 North, which was the Amazon imprint. And I didn’t know how to get those without buying them from Amazon, which I refuse to buy books from Amazon.

GIN JENNY: Sames. Yeah.

RENAY: But it sounds really nice, and it has sequels, so if I like it, there’s more.

GIN JENNY: Great.

RENAY: OK, back to you.

GIN JENNY: OK, you’ll love this one. My next one is called Plotto, The Master Book of All Plots, by William Wallace Cook. I am so charmed by this thing. It was written in the 1920s by a writer of I think pulp fiction, and it was supposed to be a guide to thinking of plots for pulp fiction books, essentially.

RENAY: Oh, neat.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, it’s so ridiculous. He starts by saying like these are the basic structures that a plot can follow and then he gives a lot—like, a lot of examples of types of that plot. So for instance, one example of a master plot is, [CLEARS THROAT] “A subtle person, being impelled by an unusual motive to engage in crafty enterprise, rescues integrity from a serious entanglement.”

RENAY: I need this book.

GIN JENNY: Right? And then he’ll give a whole bunch of examples. So the “being impelled by an unusual motive to engage in crafty enterprises” piece, he’ll give a whole bunch of examples of what that might be, categorized in all these different ways. So under the love and courtship category, he gives this example. “A is in love with B, who is devoted to scientific pursuits. A, who knows nothing of the sciences, pretends to be engaged in scientific research.”

RENAY: I need you to share all of these on Twitter so people can start writing stories about them.

GIN JENNY: I know! [LAUGHTER] It’s so charming. It’s very, very complicated. There’s so many parts. He has so many weird little ideas. It’s just immensely charming. I encountered it—pretty recently it got republished by a small press. And so it’s out now, and gosh, it’s just so delightful. Even just paging through it fills my heart with joy.

RENAY: I love humans. We’re so clever.

GIN JENNY: Oh my God, me too. [LAUGHTER] All right, over to you.

RENAY: We’re back to epic fantasy.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, we are.

RENAY: Which is very surprising. This is a very epic fantasy heavy list. I don’t read much epic fantasy.

GIN JENNY: I don’t read much epic fantasy either. I want to read more of it, but then I never do. So do I really want to? You decide.

RENAY: I think you want to. But also guilt, and time.

GIN JENNY: I do. I need to go on more camping trips—quote unquote camping trips—and then I could read epic fantasy in that setting.

RENAY: Yeah. Except the last epic fantasy novel you tried to read on a camping trip didn’t go so well. Yes, that is. That’s right, I’m talking about Dune.

[LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: That was really good shade. However I believe that I have read other epic fantasy novels on camping trips more recently than Dune, and it went really well.

RENAY: OK, that’s good. You could take several of these on a camping trip with you.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, and just experiment and see which one sticks.

RENAY: We live in the future, and you can have 18 epic fantasy novels on your phone!

GIN JENNY: God, so true. So true. So what’s the next one that I’m going to need to add to my phone for my next camping trip?

RENAY: King’s Dragon, by Kate Elliott. This is her massive epic fantasy series that actually started before Game of Thrones and is already finished.

GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER]

RENAY: So King’s Dragon is a medieval epic fantasy about the kingdom of Wendar. It’s very political monarch shenanigans, and these two characters are thrust into this political abyss. Alain and Liath, I think is how you pronounce this character’s name. And they have to discover the secret truths about themselves and take part in this war of sorcery.

I get a lot of King Arthur vibes from the blurb. And obviously I love Kate Elliott’s writing, because she is very subtle. You have to stick with her books to the very end, because she does not wrap things up. If you’re reading a Kate Elliott series, you’re in for the long haul if you want answers, buddy.

GIN JENNY: That’s what camping trips are for.

RENAY: There’s like seven books in this series, I think.

GIN JENNY: Long camping trip.

RENAY: Next is another epic fantasy novel that actually went around our friend circle a while ago called Luck in the Shadows, by Lynn Flewelling.

GIN JENNY: Oh, right!

RENAY: Which is about a kid that’s taken prisoner for a crime he was not responsible for. And then his cellmate turns out to be a spy, this rogue character who takes the kid on as his apprentice. And there’s adventure, and it sounds great.

GIN JENNY: It’s a lot of fun. I was certainly one of the people who read that series, I believe when it first came out. I was super into it. It’s a series of I think six or seven books. I really loved the first three, and then after that I thought it was diminishing returns. But I remember the first three being great, but I also haven’t revisited them. So I’m very interested to see what you think when you read it for the first time now.

RENAY: I’m very excited.

GIN JENNY: I’m excited for you.

RENAY: Back to you.

GIN JENNY: My next one is Gun Dealers Daughter, by Gina Apostol. We read Insurrecto for not the last podcast but a recent podcast, by Gina Apostol. And I loved it, and I really wanted to read more books by this author.

So Gun Dealer’s Daughter is her American debut. And it’s about the daughter of a gun dealer in the Philippines in the 1980s. I don’t know too much about it. I read some reviews of it, and people said that the personal and the political are very entwined in it, which was one thing that I liked a lot about Insurrecto. And I continue to not know that much about the Philippines and its history, and so I’m hoping that I have enough context to get everything that’s happening in Gun Dealer’s Daughter. But we’ll see.

I think the one thing that has especially fallen by the wayside in my reading is that when I like a book by a new author, I’m much less likely than I used to be to go seek out previous books by that author. And so I’d like that to change, and I’m hoping I can slightly change that by reading Gun Dealer’s Daughter.

RENAY: Huh. I have never heard of that book before.

GIN JENNY: No, I hadn’t either. And I’d never heard of Gina Apostol before Insurrecto came out. It was reviewed in The New York Times, and it sounded so great, and it was really great. It was really weird. It’s literary fiction, but really weird literary fiction. And yeah, I never heard of it before, either.

RENAY: I would like to also get better at being like, I like this author, what else have they written? But I’ve also trapped myself in this weird place where I want to read more women writers. So if I read a woman writer but I like her work, I’m like, I can’t read another book by you. I have to go find another woman to read, because I don’t want to limit my choices here. I’ve just guilted myself into this thing where I can’t do backlist stuff. I think we’ve discovered one of my reasons for not reading backlist stuff. I’ve guilted myself out of it. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: I totally understand, honestly.

RENAY: Because there’s so many women writing so many things.

GIN JENNY: There are, it’s true. And especially because of the publishing opportunities that white people are given, versus people of color, it just seems like there are fewer authors of color with robust backlists compared to white authors. So that’s another reason that I probably don’t spend as much time delving into blacklists.

RENAY: That’s also why I am conserving the backlists of some of the authors that I read, like Nnedi Okorafor and N.K. Jemisin. Because once those backlists are gone, they’re gone. I mean, you can obviously reread. They’re not gone gone.

GIN JENNY: I think that I’ve read everything that N.K. Jemisin has written. Oops. I did not do strategy on that. I saved nothing for a rainy day.

RENAY: Well, she is writing a new book, so maybe you could save that one for a rainy day.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, but let’s be real. I’m not gonna.

RENAY: Yeah, you’re not gonna. We’re all going to read it immediately and then fawn over it.

GIN JENNY: All right, what else is on your list?

RENAY: I only have one more.

GIN JENNY: Oh boy!

RENAY: It’s my last one.

GIN JENNY: Your very last one. OK.

RENAY: It is The Snow Queen, by—

GIN JENNY: Oh, that’s me! Me too! That’s on my list also. I mean, not this list that I have here. But that is a backlist book I also want to read. I’m sorry. Continue.

RENAY: By Joan D. Vinge. The blurb for this is off the wall. It’s about these winter colonists who have controlled this planet for centuries, and they are slaughtering one of the native creatures. And soon another set of colonists are going to take over, because a gate is going to close.

GIN JENNY: Ooh.

RENAY: This sounds bananas, so of course it’s on my list.

GIN JENNY: My friend Memory recommended this book to me—I think it was Memory—a really, really long time ago, and I bought it at a book sale, and it has been around my house ever since. And I still haven’t read it. Oh dear.

RENAY: I have this in ebook. I bought the ebook, even though ebook at the time was very expensive. I do not want to pay $13 for an ebook. I have never read this author, either, so it will be a new author to me, as well. So I’m very excited to get back into the history of science fiction and fantasy.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, the non-dude history of science fiction and fantasy.

RENAY: Yes, let’s be clear. Yes. Oh, no, did I forget one?

GIN JENNY: Did you forget one?

RENAY: I did.

GIN JENNY: OK. You know, I thought when you said this was your last one, I was like, wait is that ten? But then I thought I just had failed to count.

RENAY: No, I just had hit Enter too many times.

[LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: So that was your second to last one. Tell me your very, very last one.

RENAY: The very, very last one is The Dragons of Cuyahoga, by S. Andrew Swann. It is an urban fantasy novel from DAW that was published in 2001.

GIN JENNY: Wow.

RENAY: In the book’s timeline this portal suddenly opened in Cleveland, and it rendered all these electronic devices completely obsolete, and suddenly everywhere in the world is dragons, and elves, and gnomes, and dwarves.

GIN JENNY: Oh my gosh.

RENAY: And this is about a reporter for a newspaper in Cleveland who is covering some of the stuff that’s happening. And it sounds like it’s very fascinating urban fantasy. I was recommended it by my friend Rose, and I actually own it.

GIN JENNY: It sounds great. That sounds really fascinating.

RENAY: Because I had never heard of the series or this author.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, I never heard of either of those either.

RENAY: So urban fantasy and dragons, yes. Let’s go.

GIN JENNY: Woo hoo!

RENAY: And that was my very last book.

GIN JENNY: That’s very good. All right, my very last one is Tales of Innocence and Experience, by Eva Figes. This was recommended to me a while back. It sounds like it’s kind of a melding of memoir, essays, and literary criticism. So the author talks about reading fairy tales to her granddaughter, but she’s also exploring her own past as a Jewish refugee from Germany under Hitler. She’s talking about how we use fairy tales in our lives, which is something that I really love to think about.

And my friend recommended this book to me ages ago, and I just re-encountered it. It was cited in another book I was reading, and it reminded me, oh, this still sounds really, really good and relevant to my interests. So it’s nonfiction. I think it’s only non-fiction book on my list, although I have a lot of backlist non-fiction that I could be reading.

RENAY: No shame here. No shame here.

GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER] Well, that was excellent. Listeners, please tell me your favorite backlist books, especially fantasy and science fiction. Because I really would like to focus more on backlist books, especially by women of color authors.

RENAY: Also, lit fic that has a speculative element, like Station Eleven.

GIN JENNY: Oh, nice. Excellent one, yeah.

OK, so for this podcast. I read Zoo City at last by Lauren Beukes. I guess I should say what it’s about. I kind of want to make you do it, because it’s confusing. But I can do it. [SIGH]

RENAY: Are you sure you don’t want me to do it?

GIN JENNY: No, I want you to do it. Yeah, please do it, thank you so much. [LAUGHTER]

RENAY: Zoo City is about Zinzi December, who has a sloth, a 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. It is a mystery about how she gets caught up in a case of a missing pop star.

GIN JENNY: That was a flawless summary. I think you killed it. So this—Renay, you’ll be happy to hear, I’ve read three Lauren Beukes books, and this was my favorite one.

RENAY: Yay!

GIN JENNY: I’m really surprised. All her books have serial killers, by the way.

RENAY: She loves a serial killer. She loves it.

GIN JENNY: But this one, it bothered me less, I guess. The Shining Girls serial killer bothered me the most, Broken Monsters, number two, and Zoo City was the best of the serial killers.

RENAY: I think because in Zoo City, she really hit the noir vibe a little bit better. Even though The Shining Girls came after Zoo City, I think in Zoo City she manages to weave the serial killer thing so it’s not so fraught.

GIN JENNY: Yeah. I was surprised that I liked this one so much, because I tend not to like noirish books. And I think it helped a lot for me that I thought she did a really great job of evoking this version of Johannesburg. Because this is a world where, when someone is responsible for another person’s death, they acquire an animal that’s representative essentially of their guilt. And the animal is with them at all times. And that’s why Zinzi has this sloth.

And it’s just a really fascinating version of this city, and the world is really richly imagined. And she doesn’t—she makes you work for the world building.

RENAY: She really does. What I liked about Zoo City the first time I read it was how meta it was. Because there are little excerpts from what else is happening in the world.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, like news articles and encyclopedia entries and stuff like that.

RENAY: And references to Philip Pullman, which I thought was adorable. And I think one of the most interesting things is, when I revisited this book a year ago I was reading the first part of it, and I got to the part where she’s talking to the police. And the police officer points out, oh yeah, I have shots on my record, and they were all non-lethal. Because if you kill somebody in this world now, you gain an animal, and it marks you. And so when I thought about how that would change policing.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, that’s true.

RENAY: So reading this novel after the events of 2015 to 2017, it was really interesting. We don’t see the US culture so much. We only see Johannesburg. But it has really interesting implications for crowd management and policing.

GIN JENNY: A lot of things—I think that’s one thing that I liked so much about the world building, is that she builds enough world for the story to work, but you can just imagine so much more stuff around the edges of what she implies or suggests.

RENAY: And these animals aren’t like the ones in Philip Pullman. They don’t talk. They’re just animals.

GIN JENNY: They’re just animals, but they’re intelligent.

RENAY: Yeah. It would have been really weird if these animals had talked. That would have changed the whole tone of this novel.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, it sure would have. The tone is great. And I think because it’s clear from the beginning that this character has a really dark past, because she has this murder sloth, it’s very reasonable for her to feel disaffected. Not only does she have a really dark, traumatic past, but she also is kind of a social outcast because she has this animal.

RENAY: And public opinion about animals, she uses it as a metaphor for marginalization, but not a way that’s gross, which I appreciated.

GIN JENNY: Same.

RENAY: Like some restaurants, you can’t go into it if you have an animal. So what do you do when you live in a world where everybody around you can see your guilt? And even though they don’t know the details, they can still see it.

GIN JENNY: Yes, and so then they can make a lot of assumptions about you just based on something that they can see, without any additional knowledge. And also, I forgot to mention but of course I should have—when you get the animal, you also get a magic gift. And that’s actually how’s Zinzi is so good at finding lost things, because she has this gift of being able to see what people have lost.

RENAY: And it gets her in a lot of trouble.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, it does. I would say one thing that I thought was a minor weakness in this book was that the twins—so the pop star that goes missing is part of a double act. She and her twin brother performed together. And I thought the twins didn’t get a lot of characterization. I don’t think Beukes is trying to give them too much characterization, but because she’s so good at creating all the other characters, I was just really curious about what Song and S’bu’s internal lives were like, and I was so curious about what it would be like to be a rock star in this world. I got enough about their interior lives to care about what happened to them, but I would have loved to know more about them.

RENAY: Yeah, I think when you get toward the end of the novel the pacing is weird. Because also there’s that weird storyline with the emails. They’re random magical emails.

GIN JENNY: Oh, right. Yes, yeah.

RENAY: I was like, you could have moved that energy to these other characters and it would have been fine. Even looking back, I still don’t understand what’s happening with that story line. Because for listeners, Zinzi has 419 scam habit—Nigerian princes ask you for money. And she basically sends these emails out, gets bites, and then sometimes also has to go and pretend to be somebody.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, it’s really grim.

RENAY: It’s really not a good situation. And she’s being controlled because somebody owns her debt, and so he’s exploiting her work. He won’t let her go. He keeps charging her more interest or whatever.

GIN JENNY: I liked the mystery ghost emails. I thought they were cool, and I was happy with how they resolved.

RENAY: Yeah, I think I was just confused, because I didn’t quite expect that.

GIN JENNY: Well also, there’s a lot of stuff going on in this book. So it’s not surprising that—I’m sure that there’s stuff that I completely missed, because there’s just so much going on.

RENAY: Yeah. It is a very packed book. And it reads really fast, even though—it’s almost 450 pages, but it goes by very quickly.

GIN JENNY: Oh my gosh, I tore through it. I read it, not all in one sitting, but I read it very, very fast.

RENAY: Who is your favorite character?

GIN JENNY: Is it cliche if I say Benoit?

RENAY: No, because that’s my favorite character.

GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER] So Zinzi’s sleeping with this guy Benoit who has a mongoose?

RENAY: Yeah.

GIN JENNY: And he’s just really nice. He just seems really sweet. His whole thing is that he has a wife and kids who he’s been separated from—by circumstance, I don’t mean divorced. He thinks that they are possibly refugees from the war in Congo. He’s just a sweet and kind person. And Zinzi is difficult in many ways, which is why she’s fun to read about. And Benoit is not a pushover, but just a really nice person.

RENAY: But next on my list is Sloth.

GIN JENNY: Sloth is great. Sloth has opinions about Zinzi’s life and her choices.

RENAY: Oh, so many opinions. I really got super creeped out the first time I read this book. You know what this book reminds me of when it talks about the Undertow?

GIN JENNY: What?

RENAY: You know the movie Ghost with Patrick Swayze?

GIN JENNY: Yes.

RENAY: You know the scene where that one guy dies and the shadows come for him?

GIN JENNY: Yes. Oh my gosh, I had forgotten about that until just now. Yes, it is like that.

RENAY: When I was a kid, that scene in Ghost scared me so bad that I couldn’t finish the movie. I didn’t finish the movie for years. And so when I was reading Zoo City and this happened, this Undertow thing—which I think happens if you’re separated from your animal.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, this general badness comes for you and claims you.

RENAY: Yeah.

GIN JENNY: The other thing I do want to mention, they weren’t my favorite characters, because they were horrible. But I liked these two villains, the Maltese and the Marabou. They kind of reminded me of the villains from Neverwhere, Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar.

RENAY: Oh, yeah.

GIN JENNY: They’re both just extremely sinister and a team, and you never really get a complete hold on what they’re about. They were such perfect urban fantasy villains, and I just was really into it.

RENAY: What I liked about them the most was because they just fit really well in the environment. Because that environment creates desperation and criminality in people who just mean well, who are just trying to get by. But it also creates people who are looking to profit.

GIN JENNY: I would read so many sequels to this book, because I really did like it. I thought there was just so much more to explore.

RENAY: I know. It’s one of those books that I think of like Sunshine, where there’s all this amazing worldbuilding, but there’s only one book.

GIN JENNY: Yeah. I had one major reservation upon reading it. OK. [SIGH] So there’s a sex worker character who we meet pretty early on, and Beukes describes her in a really strange and dehumanizing way. She’s given female pronouns throughout, but there’s a weird fixation on whether her breasts are quote unquote natural, and the narrator keeps calling her a boy-girl.

RENAY: Mm-hmm.

GIN JENNY: And she gets serial killed, of course. And it’s stated that she’s intersex. There’s a sensationalist magazine that is making fun of her gender. And it just all felt really unpleasant.

RENAY: And also weirdly unnecessary.

GIN JENNY: Yes, incredibly unnecessary. Playing into really ugly stereotypes about people who aren’t cis gender. And I didn’t get it, because the protagonist clearly knew the girl’s gender, because she only used she pronouns for her, and so did the girl’s friends. But it’s still treated as if her gender is under question. And I thought it was just really ugly and unnecessary.

RENAY: And I never understood, because I don’t think gender is bad in any of the other work by Beukes that I’ve read. But here it’s like flavor—here’s how Zinzi December is kind of an asshole, and here’s how people are around this character are assholes. You know that these people are not good because of the way that they treat this one specific character. And I’m just like, there are other ways to show that where you don’t have to dehumanize people.

GIN JENNY: And we’ve talked about this, but Lauren Beukes has a book coming out I think in 2020, and it’s one of these books where all the men die.

RENAY: Yeah.

GIN JENNY: And you and I have both talked about that we have extreme reservations about that promise. But having read this book and seeing how Lauren Beukes dealt with this character, I definitely want to stay ten miles away from Afterland.

RENAY: Yeah, I’m really nervous.

GIN JENNY: I’m just not going to read it. I think it’s going to piss me off.

RENAY: I am probably going to try it, because I generally try most of her books.

GIN JENNY: OK.

RENAY: I didn’t get very far in The Broken Monsters one. I really liked Zoo City, and I really liked Moxyland. Moxyland will blow your socks off. I’m still confused about Moxyland years later.

GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER] OK, I’ll give it a try.

RENAY: Moxyland is the future of STDs and the intersection of advertising.

GIN JENNY: That sounds good.

RENAY: What if you could advertise with somebody by injecting them with something, and then their skin would show your ads, but then they could infect other people.

GIN JENNY: Ooh, weird.

RENAY: Moxyland is real weird.

GIN JENNY: It sounds weird, but it sounds good. I mean, it sounds good weird.

Well, this was an excellent—as all of your SF starter pack books have been, this was an excellent one, and I’m really glad that I got to read it. One of the reasons they didn’t read this one right away was because the branch of the library that I typically go to doesn’t have it. So this was just a good motivator for me to put it on hold and actually read it, because I really, really dug it.

RENAY: Guess what.

GIN JENNY: What?

RENAY: When you guys finish your starter pack, you get to have Science Fiction and Fantasy 102 list.

[LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: That’s going to be great. Actually that sounds wonderful.

RENAY: Which I will come back and give to you.

GIN JENNY: Oh boy. All right, well that’s going to be good motivation for me to read Spin and Larklight. And then I really think that’s it. Spin and Larklight, I think, are the only two.

RENAY: I’m so proud of you.

GIN JENNY: Thank you.

RENAY: Considering that you gave me a rec list and I’m still not done with it.

GIN JENNY: Well, you should be extra proud of Whiskey Jenny, because this is basically a brand new genre to her, and she’s done amazing.

RENAY: I know. I’m very, very proud. Good job, Whiskey Jenny.

GIN JENNY: We miss you, Whiskey Jenny. Well, Renay, it has been so lovely having you on the podcast. Where can the people find you online?

RENAY: I am on Twitter @renay, R-E-N-A-Y. You can also find me tweeting @fangirlpod for my podcast. And I’m on Dreamwidth at ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org.

GIN JENNY: Perfect. Well, you’re the best. It really has been just lovely having you on.

RENAY: Yay! Thank you.

GIN JENNY: This has been the Reading the End bookcast with Renay and one of the demographically similar Jennys. You can visit the blog at readingtheend.com. You can follow me on Twitter @readingtheend. We are both on Goodreads as Whiskey Jenny and Gin Jenny. And you can email us at readingtheend@gmail.com. If you like what we do, become a podcast patron at Patreon.com/readingtheend. And if you’re listening to us on iTunes, please leave us a review.

Until next time, a quote from Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi. “Even if she got her sums right and it turned out life owed her something, there was no way such a bill would ever be settled. Life isn’t ill-natured. It’s just dirt poor, like any other public resource.”

[THEME SONG] You don’t judge a book by its cover. Page one’s not a much better view. And shortly you’re gonna discover the middle won’t mollify you. So whether whiskey’s your go-to or you’re like my gin-drinking friend, no matter what you are imbibing, you’ll be better off in the end reading the end.