I know, I know! Y’all have missed us and we have been MIA! Honestly, the podcast has been cursed over the last little while. First we had a podcast audio disaster, which we hoped and believed we could come back from, but wow, we could not. So we lost that podcast (argh) and then had some health and family issues, mostly on the side of me, Gin Jenny, that put us on a bit of a podcast hiatus. Nevertheless, we persisted! Eventually! And here we are back with a short episode just to catch y’all up on what we’ve been reading over the break. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you on the go!
What we talked about:
Chilling Effect, Valerie Valdes
Steel Crow Saga, Paul Krueger
The Likeness, Tana French
The Untamed (Netflix)
In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado
Rules for Vanishing, Kate Alice Marshall
Underwater
The Luminous Dead, Caitlin Starling
Ghoulies
Ghoulies Go to College
Catfishing on CatNet, Naomi Kritzer
Circe, Madeline Miller
Evvie Drake Starts Over, Linda Holmes
Heaven, My Home, Attica Locke
Sun Gardens: Cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, Anna Atkins and Larry J. Schaaf
And Other Stories
Theft, Luke Brown
genderbent Twilight podcast
The Season of Styx Malone, Kekla Magoon
The Right Swipe, Alisha Rai
Fumbled, Alexa Martin
Get a Life, Chloe Brown, Talia Hibbert
Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch
Washington Black, Esi Edugyan (and the podcast about it!)
An Inheritance of Ashes, Leah Bobet
The Psychology of Time Travel, Kate Mascarenhas
Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones (Folio Society edition)
The King Must Die, Mary Renault
The Bull from the Sea, Mary Renault
The Ghost of Opalina, Peggy Bacon
Permanent Record, Mary HK Choi
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
WHISKEY JENNY: Hello. Welcome back to the Reading the End Bookcast with the Demographically Similar Jennys. I’m Whiskey Jenny.
GIN JENNY: And I’m Gin Jenny.
WHISKEY JENNY: And we’re very excited to be back in the year 2020. We went on a short hiatus after we tragically lost a podcast.
GIN JENNY: It was so sad.
WHISKEY JENNY: We talked about Chilling Effect, by Valerie Valdes. So we did read that, but sorry, Chilling Effect, it’s gone to the sands of time.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: So today we’re just going to do a quick check-in on what we missed with each other bookwise over the break, and talk about maybe some books that we gave or received for Christmas giving. Then we’re going to find out what we’re reading for next time. But really we both just missed each other and wanted to talk, and we also wanted to let our podcast listeners that we are still podcasting, and we’re alive, and happy new year.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, happy new year to everyone. Mine has been really terrible so far, so I’m hoping the year turns around. [CHUCKLES]
WHISKEY JENNY: I really hope so, too. Maybe you got all of the bad stuff frontloaded. And then—
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I don’t really think so, because it’s an election year. So I think that there’s a lot of terrible stuff still to come.
WHISKEY JENNY: You’re probably right.
GIN JENNY: By that I don’t mean that I think that Trump is going to win the election. What I mean is the election was very stressful last time, and I assume it’s going to be very stressful this time.
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s going to happen no matter what. I mean, hopefully.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
WHISKEY JENNY: Um, anyways. [LAUGHTER]
Well, let’s start off with what you’re reading right now, Gin Jenny.
GIN JENNY: I’m reading a book called Steel Crow Saga, by Paul Krueger, which is a secondary world fantasy that is inspired by Filipino history, among others. So there’s a lot of politics. I’m really enjoying it. I’m about 100 pages in. The problem I’m having is that my ability to read long books is totally boned, and this book is long. So even though I’m enjoying it, I’m like, oh my God, there’s so much of you still to go. [LAUGHTER] I really think it’s the fault of these troubled times that I can’t focus anymore for that length of time.
WHISKEY JENNY: Same. Same. I’m having a hard time getting through books. So then I just read a couple of short novellas, that that really boosted my confidence. [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I really think—yeah, Tor.com does a line of novellas, and I’m always like, I’m just going to read a couple of these. Knock these right out. [LAUGHTER]
But the book is really good. I don’t read that much secondary world fantasy because I find it kind of intimidating. And I am indeed having kind of a hard time—
WHISKEY JENNY: I’m so sorry. Can you explain to me what secondary world fantasy means?
GIN JENNY: You know, I really question if this is a term that gets used. I don’t think I just made it up. But a bunch of people have asked me to explain it, so now I’m not sure. Secondary world fantasy means it takes place in a world other than ours. So Game of Thrones is a secondary world fantasy, but The Changeling is not.
WHISKEY JENNY: Got it. Thank you.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, you’re welcome.
WHISKEY JENNY: Is Game of Thrones really not even on Earth?
GIN JENNY: Yeah, no, it’s not on Earth. It’s on a planet that has decades long winters and shit.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh. I guess I never put that together. [LAUGHTER] I mean, I haven’t seen it or read it, so.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, that checks out. [LAUGHTER]
Yeah, so I’m having a slightly hard time following. There’s a lot of different nations, and I’m having a hard time following what relationships they all have to each other. I think that if I knew more about East Asian history I would be doing better. But I have worked out which nation is fantasy Japan. And I think I know which one is fantasy Philippines. So, you know, things are improving as I’m going along. I’m getting better as I go along.
WHISKEY JENNY: Cool.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. And it’s a lot of women, which is really cool. It’s got four protagonists, three of them are women. And they’re all great. One of them is a—she does a forbidden kind of magic, and everyone’s very worked up about that. And one of them is a secret police person, but not a bad one. Which, you know, question mark question mark to that. And also a princess. A princess in disguise and secret police. So a lot of things going on there.
WHISKEY JENNY: Whoa.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: She’s got a busy life.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: And one of them is a street thief.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, great.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I mean, good stuff for that one. And then one of them is a prince who is kind of a jerk. And I’m hoping that the arc of the book will be him learning to be less of a jerk. But we’ll see.
WHISKEY JENNY: Or maybe they kill him and he’s just not there anymore.
GIN JENNY: I mean, he’s on the flap as one of the protagonist, so it’d be a bold move to kill him. But I’ll keep you posted. What are you reading?
WHISKEY JENNY: Right now I’m reading The Likeness, by Tana French, which is the second in the Dublin Murder Squad series.
GIN JENNY: Oh, yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: I’m mostly enjoying it. I have a couple of notes. Again, this is this series whose structure I really like, in that it’s not the same detective every book, but it’s someone who is kind of a side character in the previous book now becomes our main detective in the next book. So it’s all people in or connected to the Dublin Murder Squad, hence the name of the series.
And this main detective is named Cassie. And I loved her in the first book, so I’m really excited that she’s our protagonist now. But—this might be a mild spoiler for this book, so plug your ears. But I haven’t finished it, but it’s just at the beginning, where things go. So first of all, they find a body that looks exactly like Cassie. And there’s no like even hand-wavy like, maybe it was plastic surgery. And no one is like, huh. I mean, they’re kind of like, that’s weird, but also, like, I guess this is just a thing that happens sometimes, that people look like identical twins.
GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER]
WHISKEY JENNY: And I really wish that there had been more time dedicated to letting me wrap my brain around that. And also, it’s not magic. This is Dublin. So that was the one thing that I was like, okaaaaay. And then this girl who looks exactly like Cassie dies, but they tell everyone that she was only wounded and in the hospital for a week. And then they sent Cassie back in undercover as the victim to solve her own murder. But this girl lives with her four best friends, and I just don’t think that you could fool them. [LAUGHTER] She has a week to prepare and learn everything about this girl and then go undercover. Not with just random acquaintances, but her four live-in best friends. I just don’t think you could do it! And no one has raised that concern in the book either, and it’s driving me nuts. Like, if you were replaced by a bot, I think I would notice. I just do.
GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER] I think so, too. I mean, I think so, too. I think the illusion would just not last very long.
WHISKEY JENNY: But apparently it lasts a whole book. But I do really love her writing. Every once in a while there’s a sentence or a phrase that just knocks me sideways. But the first book, if you recall, I also had some issues with, so I’m thinking maybe Tana French is just not an unqualified win for me. So we’ll see.
GIN JENNY: I read two of her books. That might have been one of them, but it was a long, long time ago. And they were fine. They weren’t really—they were kind of middle of the road reads for me, so I didn’t continue reading her work. So yeah, me too, is what I’m saying.
WHISKEY JENNY: Great. Well, is there anything that you read over hiatus that you wanted to catch us up on?
GIN JENNY: OK, so I had a couple of things. Well, OK. Part of me wants to mention I’ve been reading a lot of fanfic for the TV show The Untamed, but I think you would see through that and know that I just wanted to talk about The Untamed.
WHISKEY JENNY: [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: So.
WHISKEY JENNY: I mean, that’s OK. If you want to talk about The Untamed we can.
GIN JENNY: But no, it’s OK. Just, internet, watch The Untamed. It’s really great. It’s on Netflix. The first three episodes are quite confusing, but if you hang in there things will resolve for you pretty quickly.
WHISKEY JENNY: Can you give us the elevator pitch for The Untamed?
GIN JENNY: Yeah, so it’s a Chinese wuxia show, which means magic martial arts. And it’s based on a very gay web novel. And the basic thing is that the storm cloud character is soft for the sunshine character. It is so romantic. It’s just pure romance. And it also has a lot of wonderful sibling stuff that made me very emotional. And there’s a lot of good fanfic about it, and people are writing more and more. And especially they’re writing a lot of stuff that tells the stories of the women characters, who are amazing in the TV show but do not, in my opinion, have enough to do.
WHISKEY JENNY: Classic. Yes.
GIN JENNY: Yes, I know. I know. Tale as old as time. [SIGH] Tell me one thing you’ve been reading.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well. I can’t remember if we’ve announced this on podcast.
GIN JENNY: Oh my gosh, I’m so excited. I really don’t think we have.
WHISKEY JENNY: But we’re just going to do it again anyway if we have. Apologies. I—wait for it.
GIN JENNY: Wait for it.
WHISKEY JENNY: Finished City on Fire!
GIN JENNY: [GASP] [MUSIC AND ALARMS] City on fire! City on fire! City on fire!
WHISKEY JENNY: Woo!
GIN JENNY: Man, I’m so sad that I’m never going to be able to use the sound drop again. Like, that was the last time.
WHISKEY JENNY: I mean, we could probably find ways to work it into conversation. [LAUGHTER] Challenge accepted.
GIN JENNY: I’m so amazed. You have been reading this book for what feels like our entire lives.
WHISKEY JENNY: I think I have, basically. Certainly a massive portion of our podcasting lives together.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, it’s been like two years, right?
WHISKEY JENNY: I think it’s been more. Let me see when I marked it as Started Reading on Goodreads. I started reading it in January 2016. [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: Oh my God. Oh my gosh. So it took almost four years.
WHISKEY JENNY: It sure did. [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: You know what’s so funny about this to me? When I ask you what you thought of it, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, I enjoyed it, but it was way too long. And that was the opinion you had of it in like February 2016.
WHISKEY JENNY: That’s correct. I knew back then, and I was right. [LAUGHTER] That is 100% my review.
GIN JENNY: Let me ask you this question. Would you read another book by Garth Risk Hallberg?
WHISKEY JENNY: If it was under 200 pages, absolutely.
GIN JENNY: Ha ha. Well, so, no, then, is the answer.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: If he writes another 1000 page doorstop, then no. I don’t trust him with that length anymore.
GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER] Well, I’m truly so impressed that you finished this. I would have abandoned it long ago.
WHISKEY JENNY: I probably should have, but I do feel really good about finishing it. It does feel really good. I get a little zing of pleasure whenever I look at it on Goodreads.
GIN JENNY: You should. You should, that’s amazing. It’s really, really impressive.
WHISKEY JENNY: Thank you.
GIN JENNY: In books of a reasonable length—[LAUGHTER]
WHISKEY JENNY: We should have a new segment. [LAUGHTER] But yes, go on.
GIN JENNY: I read The Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado, which is her memoir of being in an abusive relationship. Basically she found herself in this situation, and when she went to read about other queer women this had happened to, she had a hard time finding stories like hers, so she wrote this book.
Each chapter is called the dream house as something. So it’s like, “The Dream House as Omen,” “The Dream House as Picaresque,” “The Dream House as World Building.” And she draws on a lot of fairy tale imagery. So it’s tough reading at times, but I thought it was really great. I thought the writing was beautiful. I thought she had a lot of really interesting emotional insights. And it’s quite short. I mean, it’s a slim book, and a lot of the chapters are very short. And I think that helped me to get through it, because obviously the subject matter is quite tough. So to feel that one was making progress was, I think, beneficial to the reading experience.
WHISKEY JENNY: That’s a cool structure, though. I like that approach.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I really liked it. And it was interesting, because of course all the chapters were kind of—it went in a roughly chronological sequence, but a lot of the chapter elements were not precisely chronological. She was kind of skipping around. So it was cool. It was an interesting read. It felt like you were kind of filling in the puzzle as you went along.
WHISKEY JENNY: Did you read anything else while we were on hiatus?
GIN JENNY: Yeah, so I want to mention one more thing. Actually, I want to mention two. I read this book called Rules for Vanishing, by Kate Alice Marshall, which is a YA novel. It was the scariest thing, by far, that I’ve ever read. It was so scary. I do recommend it to people, but it’s the scariest book I’ve ever read.
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s the scariest book you’ve ever read?
GIN JENNY: Yes.
WHISKEY JENNY: Wow.
GIN JENNY: At one point something so scary happened that I screamed no, no, no and threw the book across the room.
WHISKEY JENNY: Wow.
GIN JENNY: It was really scary.
WHISKEY JENNY: I might not read that one.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, and it was consistently scary. It stayed scary all throughout. It was really, really frightening.
WHISKEY JENNY: In related news, I saw two scary movies two nights in a row.
GIN JENNY: [GASP] What?
WHISKEY JENNY: This is—I know that you didn’t ask me, but—
GIN JENNY: No, now I’m so impressed. What were they?
WHISKEY JENNY: Thank you. Well, one of them doesn’t count. I went to see Underwater, which is Kristen Stewart underwater Alien.
GIN JENNY: Oh, that looked really scary, yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s basically Alien. So if you liked and enjoyed the experience of Alien, then you would like this.
GIN JENNY: Well, I’ve never seen Alien, so.
WHISKEY JENNY: But it is underwater.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, so I don’t think I could handle it. Because I cannot cope with rushing water. I find that extremely, untenably frightening.
WHISKEY JENNY: There’s not so much rushing water. They’re mostly underwater the whole time.
GIN JENNY: OK.
WHISKEY JENNY: So slightly different. But there was one very claustrophobic—so I was prepared for that kind of scariness. But then there was one “now we have to crawl through a small tunnel” claustrophobia scene that I was like, wait, no, this was not in the trailer. I was not prepared for this. And I wasn’t prepared for their stuff, but I knew sort of what kind of scares to expect. But that claustrophobia one really snuck up on me.
GIN JENNY: I read a book that sounds like it was kind of similar in scariness quality. In fact, the author recommended Rules for Vanishing on her Twitter. And I should have known that it was going to be really scary, because her own book was really scary. Yeah, it was Caitlin Starling’s book The Luminous Dead, which is about a woman—it’s a sci-fi book, and it’s about this woman who has to navigate what seems to be a very hostile planet. A lot of it’s underwater. It might be haunted. And she has all this equipment and stuff, and she also has a guide who is sort of talking her through each of the sections of planet that she has to get through.
It was, again, very claustrophobic. There were very claustrophobic parts of her crawling through tunnels and stuff, and I don’t think I could have handled it in visual format.
OK, so that was one. What was the other one?
WHISKEY JENNY: And then the next night—it was a real back to back. Again, this one was not actually scary. It was Ghoulies, which was adorable.
GIN JENNY: I’ve never even heard of that. What is it?
WHISKEY JENNY: I think it’s from the ’80s. I think they were maybe making it at or around the same time as Gremlins, so it’s the same sort of creature puppet vibe. Someone else, I saw referred to it as one of those ’80s “let’s have a party and then do a ritual” movies, which is literally what happens. [LAUGHTER]
Anyway, they do a ritual and summon these little gremlins. And they’re so cute. I just went up one for a pet. Young Mariska Hargitay is in it, and she’s amazing. She’s so charming and cute.
GIN JENNY: Aw.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. Again, the puppets are so cute. There’s one where it looks as if our guy is reading him—not our guy. He’s the one who summons them, so this guy is kind of getting pulled to the dark side. But anyway, he’s the main dude. And it looks like he’s reading him a bedtime story, and it’s just great. There’s another scene where one is just over his shoulder and has its little arm around him and is just patting him. It’s jut so precious.
GIN JENNY: Aw.
WHISKEY JENNY: Look up some pictures of the Ghoulies, because they’re adorable. And then it was a whole series. And one of the movie titles—I went with Friend of the Podcast Ashley, and she informed me that one of the later movie titles is Ghoulies Go to College, which is just an amazing title.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Aw, that sounds adorable.
WHISKEY JENNY: It was really cute. And really not scary at all.
GIN JENNY: I watched a movie, too, and I felt really proud of myself.
WHISKEY JENNY: What did you watch?
GIN JENNY: Booksmart.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, what did you think?
GIN JENNY: It was all right.
WHISKEY JENNY: Sure, sure. Yep.
GIN JENNY: Everyone loved it so much. And I saw the trailer, and I was like, this is going to be a sad comedy, isn’t it? But everyone loved it, so I was like, no, no, Jenny, give it a chance. But I was right. It was a sad comedy.
WHISKEY JENNY: It is a sad comedy. Absolutely, you were right.
GIN JENNY: I was right. I can’t believe I questioned myself so much. So I should have known. And I didn’t like it. And then I was like, man, I should have just watched Almost Famous. And then I watched Almost Famous.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, that’s a sad comedy.
GIN JENNY: It’s not a sad comedy. It’s a drama.
WHISKEY JENNY: Hmm.
GIN JENNY: I don’t think you could—I mean, Whiskey Jenny, would you classify Almost Famous as a comedy?
WHISKEY JENNY: I mean, I’ve only seen it the one time. I feel like I got the same vibe, which is like, it’s funny, but feelings.
GIN JENNY: I definitely do not think of Almost Famous—I would be shocked if someone called Almost Famous a comedy to me.
WHISKEY JENNY: Again, I’ve only seen it one time. You’re the expert on it. Any Knight and Day questions can be directed to me. Almost Famous go to Gin Jenny.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: All right, yay to both of us for watching movies.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yay!
GIN JENNY: But actually the book that I wanted to mention was not Rules for Vanishing, the scariest book on earth. It was Catfishing on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer. And this is recommended to me by the wonderful Sharon, who is the kind and generous soul that does our transcripts.
WHISKEY JENNY: Thanks, Sharon!
GIN JENNY: It’s about a girl called Steph who has never lived—this is going to sound grim, and the book is actually in many ways very sweet. It’s about a girl called Steph who has never lived anywhere longer than six months because she and her mom are on the run from her abusive father. So her main friendships are online on this app called CatNet. And there’s a friendly AI who likes Steph and her CatNet friends and starts trying to help them.
WHISKEY JENNY: Ooh.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. So it’s—
WHISKEY JENNY: Ooh.
GIN JENNY: I know. So it’s a very dear and sweet book in many ways. But it also does have this abusive father character who is very frightening. Just a warning to people who might be thing about reading it. Whiskey Jenny, do you talk about books you gave and received for Christmas?
WHISKEY JENNY: I do. Let’s see, I gave one friend Circe, by Madeline Miller, because I just adored it. I gave my mom Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes, even though I haven’t read it yet. But I’m just so sure that I will love it and that she will love it that I still gave it to her. And she started it that day and then was three quarters of the way through the next day, so.
GIN JENNY: Aw, yay.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, we ended up having this really hilarious conversation where I couldn’t remember the name of it and I was like, what was that one? You know, with the Maine and the baseball and the lobster on the cover? And it was like this very strange version of charades that we were playing. [LAUGHTER] You know, the lobster one!
And then I gave my dad the newest Attica Locke series with the Texas Ranger. It’s called Heaven, My Home, and it’s the second after Bluebird, Bluebird. I haven’t read it either, and I’ve not heard if he liked it or not, but I know he liked Bluebird, Bluebird, so.
GIN JENNY: Nice. Good choice.
WHISKEY JENNY: Fingers crossed. And then I received from my parents a book called Sun Gardens, which is about the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins. I think it was sort of an already published book with these various chapters and essays on cyanotypes. And then the New York Public Library did a big exhibition recently of Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes, which closed like a week before I started taking a cyanotype class. Like, I just missed it.
GIN JENNY: Oh!
WHISKEY JENNY: I know. I’m so bummed. But they reissued and turned this book into kind of also the catalog for that exhibit.
GIN JENNY: Nice, yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: So it’s sort of a combo. It’s kind of an art book, but also some really interesting essays about—I haven’t finished it, but about practical stuff around cyanotypes, and how you store them, and some different chemical stuff. But then also their artistic importance, blah, blah, blah. Not blah, blah, blah, but et cetera, et cetera. [LAUGHTER] So that’s been really great.
And then in the mail—I’m counting this as a gift, because it felt like a gift. In the mail, I got my second—I did thing with And Other Stories where you can become a subscriber, basically, to books.
GIN JENNY: Oh, yeah, yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: You give them some money and then they send you two random books. So I got my second one from them, which I haven’t read it yet, but it’s called Theft by Luke Brown. And there’s a very adorable seagull on the cover.
GIN JENNY: Aw.
WHISKEY JENNY: But then the cover quote is, “acerbic but tender, biting but elegiac,” and I was like, um, no.
GIN JENNY: Hmm.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, no. [LAUGHTER] So I haven’t read it. But again, I still think this is just a really cool publishing model.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, me too.
WHISKEY JENNY: I’m excited to see what else And Other Stories does. And maybe I’ll read it. Who knows?
GIN JENNY: I’ve thought about doing something like that. I’ve been kind of—one of my plans for this year is to find a publisher to subscribe to, a small publisher to subscribe to in that way.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. It feels nice.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, it seems nice.
WHISKEY JENNY: Way to disrupt the model, And Other Stories and other publishers.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, we’re nighttime patients of the arts.
[LAUGHTER] Oh, listeners in case you don’t remember this ridiculous thing, it’s a reference to gender swapped Twilight. [LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: I’m sorry, but we didn’t make that up. That’s an actual term that got used.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: OK, so in books that I got for people for Christmas, I got my little cousin a book by Kekla Magoon which I’m very excited about, and I hope she liked it. We had the same birthday, so I always get her a Christmas gift. I don’t always get—yeah, so I don’t get gifts for all my cousins, but because we share a birthday, I try to make things a little special for us.
And then I got my aunt The Right Swipe, by Alisha Rai, and Fumbled, by Alexa Martin, because she has never read romance novels before.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, wow.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: What a big responsibility to pick the two to start with.
GIN JENNY: I know.
WHISKEY JENNY: I feel like good choices, though.
GIN JENNY: Thank you. One of the reasons that I chose those two is that they both are trade paperbacks and have those illustrated covers. So in case she’s a little leery of romance novels, I didn’t want to start her with something with a super romance-novely cover. And then I think if she likes them, I can move her on to the hard stuff. So I’m hoping these will be a good entry point for her.
If she likes them, I’m thinking I might get her Get a Life, Chloe Brown, by Talia Hibbert, because I just finished reading it and it was so great, and also has an illustrated cover and is a contemporary romance novel. So if she liked those two, I think this would be a good comp.
I got my mother Because Internet, by Gretchen McCulloch, which is a book I have been wanting to talk about on this podcast since it came out, which I think was in June. And I couldn’t, because my mom listens to this podcast, and I wanted to get her this book and surprise her.
But it’s really good. It’s an amazing non-fiction book about internet linguistics and the way language has evolved on the internet. And it’s legitimately really wonderful. She talks about a lot of the things you’d expect, like the way we use punctuation, the way we use emojis, but also all this stuff that I’d never thought about before, like how Arabic speakers Romanize their words when they’re talking on Twitter, because they use a different alphabet. So that was really interesting.
WHISKEY JENNY: Ooh.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, there’s just a lot of little pockets of information that I had no idea about that she gets into. So I have a copy, too. I’ve been parceling it out to myself tiny section by tiny section because I like it so much and I don’t want it to be over.
WHISKEY JENNY: And was your mom in fact surprised?
GIN JENNY: She was surprised. I don’t think she—I think I maybe kept it from her too much. But the problem is, if she had known about it, I think she would have bought it. So I hit the New York Times Book Review that had a review of it.
WHISKEY JENNY: That is the next level sneakiness.
GIN JENNY: I’ve been really vigilant.
WHISKEY JENNY: So impressed.
GIN JENNY: Thank you. And then for books I received, I got a lovely hardback of Washington Black, which we read for podcast. And I loved it, so I’m excited to have that. I got a nice hardback of Leah Bobet’s YA novel An Inheritance of Ashes which I read a few years ago and really liked and then I recently reread it and was like, oh, this is actually even better than I remember.
WHISKEY JENNY: Whoa.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. So I was excited to get that. I got a copy of The Psychology of Time Travel, which was one of my favorite books of last year. And actually, it’s the last present my aunt got me before she died at the start of this year, so, you know, it feels very poignant now. [SIGH]
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, yeah. How special.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. And then my lovely sister got me a Folio Society book of Howl’s Moving Castle. And if you’re not familiar with the Folio Society, their books are fancy AF. They all come in boxes, which is already fancy. The binding is very good quality, the paper’s nice quality, almost all of them have color illustrations inside.
WHISKEY JENNY: Color illustrations? Good lord.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, they’re really, really nice. I’m so excited that the Folio Society had a sale in January and I bought two books from them, even though they’re quite pricey. [LAUGHTER]
WHISKEY JENNY: Ooh, what’d you get?
GIN JENNY: I got two books by Mary Renault, who’s one of my favorite authors. The two I got, it’s a duology about Theseus, so The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. Yeah, and they’re not actually my favorite books of hers, but when the Folio Society previously had some of her books available to buy, I didn’t buy them, and now they’re not available anymore, and I really regret not buying them.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, no.
GIN JENNY: So I wanted to stave off future regrets.
WHISKEY JENNY: Smart. What’s that book about the cat that you can never find? Odessa the Cat or something?
GIN JENNY: Odessa the Cat?
WHISKEY JENNY: [LAUGHTER] Is this another lobster situation? Oh no.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I’m trying to think of any book about a cat that I can’t find.
WHISKEY JENNY: Maybe there’s just a cat on the cover and it’s actually about a cat. There’s a book that you can never find, by an author.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Do you have any further information? I’m really racking my brains.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, I feel like there’s an—it’s like Odette or Odessa. There’s an O name.
GIN JENNY: OK. Oh, The Ghost of Opalina!
WHISKEY JENNY: There it is!
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Absolutely, The Ghost of Opalina.
WHISKEY JENNY: Is there a cat? Is there a cat involved?
GIN JENNY: Yes, it’s about a ghost cat. Yes.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, great. OK.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, The Ghost of Opalina was one of my favorite books as a kid. It’s super rare. You can only find copies for like $500. So pretty much it’s a waiting game now until the current owners of that book die and their heirs sell it. And then I guess I’ll get a copy. Yeah, if the Folio Society released an edition of that, I would die. I would be so excited.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, I’m glad that we were able to do a hiatus, but I’m really excited to be back and talking to you again.
GIN JENNY: Oh my gosh, me too. Yeah, and we will return with normal length, normal format podcasts very soon.
WHISKEY JENNY: So soon. In fact, would you like to tell us what we’re reading for normal next podcast?
GIN JENNY: Yes, so normal next podcast I’m choosing Mary H.K. Choi’s Permanent Record, which is one of the books from your fall book preview. It’s a YA book about a pop star and a food store employee who fall in love. I think he works at a neighborhood grocery store. Like you, Whiskey Jenny, I just really enjoy famous person/normal person falling in love story.
WHISKEY JENNY: So much, yes.
GIN JENNY: So we’ll see how this goes. I’m still a bit sad that we had to lose The Chilling Effect podcast, but y’all have to know we, encountered so many difficulties with that podcast. It was absolutely cursed.
WHISKEY JENNY: Multiple ones. Multiple ones.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, there were multiple issues. And ultimately, it was just not salvageable.
WHISKEY JENNY: It felt like it wasn’t meant to be, and we didn’t want to re-record again, because it felt like we would be tempting the fates.
GIN JENNY: Yes. [LAUGHTER]
WHISKEY JENNY: So we accept our destiny and we will not release that episode.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Well, there’s nothing to release. I mean, the audio is totally boned. But yeah, Permanent Record, I feel more optimistic. I think we’ll make it through on that one.
WHISKEY JENNY: We can do it.
GIN JENNY: So thank you for listening. And until next time, a quote from From Blossoms, by Li-Young Lee. “There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”
[GLASSES CLINK]This has been the Reading the End bookcast with a demographically similar Jennys. You can visit the blog at ReadingTheEnd.com. You can follow us on Twitter @ReadingTheEnd. We are both on Goodreads as Whiskey Jenny and Gin Jenny. And you can email us, we love it when you do, at readingtheend@gmail.com. If you like what we do, you can become a podcast patron at patreon.com/readingtheend. And if you’re listening to us on iTunes, please leave us to review. It helps other people find the podcast.
[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.