Skip to content

Author: Gin Jenny

Challenges and a request for advice

As you have probably all heard, the R(eaders) I(mbibing) P(eril) Challenge has returned! September and October are the months for the blogosphere to be reading books that are spooky and mythic. I have made up a tentative list of books for myself, and I shall pick the best ones to read this month and next month. On Jellicoe Road, Melina Marchetta Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton The Magicians and Mrs. Quent, Galen Beckett Here Lies Arthur, Philip Reeve (does this count? I can’t decide) Affinity, Sarah Waters Blue is for Nightmares, Laurie Faria Stolarz The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos…

72 Comments

More nonfiction

More than Just Race, William Julius Wilson My library said that it had all these books by bell hooks, on whom I developed a girl crush in college, but when I went to the section of the library where bell hooks’s books were supposed to be, there were none! I should have checked to see that it was my branch of the library that has those books. But I was too excited to read about racism to just walk away, and I have heard many shiny good things about William Julius Wilson, so I checked out a few of his…

22 Comments

Bad Motherhood for Amateurs, Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon

Before writing about people writing about parenting, can I say, happy anniversary to my own lovely parents? Happy anniversary, Mumsy & Daddy! Y’all are the best ever! Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, who are married and writers, both wrote books of essays about parenting and family. I checked them out of the library together. Waldman’s book, Bad Mother, had eighteen chapters and an introduction, and Chabon’s, Manhood for Amateurs, had thirty-nine chapters. So I would basically read a chapter of Bad Mother and then two chapters of Manhood for Amateurs until I had finished them both. This was very pleasing…

34 Comments

Drab lunacy

My older sister is a big fan of the simple food. She likes rice, and cheese, and meat. You would think that Mexican food would be perfect for her, since it’s all just different ways of putting together rice and meat and cheese and sometimes potatoes and beans. But she hates Mexican food. All of it. Won’t eat it. The ingredients are perfect for her, but somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts. That is how I felt about Matthew Kneale’s When We Were Romans. Its component parts were all good: Matthew Kneale, award-winning author; family…

25 Comments

Runaways (vol. 1), Brian K. Vaughn and Adrian Adolpha

Runaways has been sounding wonderful to me for a while now. It’s a comic book about a group of kids whose parents turn out to be supervillains. The kids witness their parents sacrificing a young woman; duly horrified, they run away from home. Their parents are supervillains and they all run away! Supervillains! Their parents are supervillains! As premises for comic books go, this is a fun one. With runaway children, and parents that are supervillains. It was adorable and charming in many ways. I am sitting here heaving huge sighs of unhappiness, because I wanted to and in many…

18 Comments

Suite Scarlett, Maureen Johnson

When I got home from my internship, I went to the library and basically checked out all the books Memory has read over the last year or so that sounded awesome. What can I say? The girl’s persuasive, and she’s been reading a lot of fantasy while I’ve been away, and I’ve been hungry–starved–for fantasy. I checked out Ship of Magic (which, alas, I couldn’t get into), Purple and Black (blew my mind), Jo Walton’s Farthing and Ha’Penny, and Suite Scarlett. (Okay, I guess it was not all the books Memory has read over the last year. It is just…

29 Comments

Their Finest Hour and a Half, Lissa Evans

Forgive the probable idiocy and inanity of this review. I read Their Finest Hour and a Half a few weeks ago, and now it is hard for me to remember things about it. It is a funny book–I kept saying “comic book” but that’s not really want I meant–about London during the Blitz. More or less, it centers on a propaganda film the British Ministry of Information is making. The characters are Edith, a seamstress and aspiring clothing designer who keeps getting bombed out; Ambrose, an aging film actor only interested in himself; and Catrin, an artist’s wife, newly tapped…

7 Comments

It Ends with Revelations, Dodie Smith

Poor Dodie Smith. What a shame to have written your first book, and it’s I Capture the Castle, not far off being the best book ever, narrated by a character that is the perfect blend of innocence and charming worldly practicality. Thereafter you can write more books, but none of them will ever be as good, and everyone will feel sad that your subsequent books are not I Capture the Castle. In fact it would not be unbearably dissimilar to the plight of the father in I Capture the Castle, except without the Joyce comparisons. It Ends with Revelations has…

47 Comments

Mothernight, Sarah Stovell

Sarah Stovell didn’t mock me like Martha Baillie. Sarah Stovell’s back-cover quotation about time was meant to console me. Her back cover quotation said “I was beginning to realize that time didn’t move forward here. It just spun round and round, circling an old date, endlessly.” Bad for the characters. Good for me. Or it would be if time really worked that way, which it doesn’t, and you can tell because I am now back home working on finding a job. But Sarah Stovell actually knows this. Later in Mothernight she says “Time is cruel. A relentless one-way street to…

19 Comments

The Incident Report, Martha Baillie

The week before I left my internship, I checked out six books from the university library, and the only two paperbacks (The Incident Report and Mothernight, of which more later) had nothing on their back covers except for quotations about time. It was like they were mocking me, like: Hey, your time in this internship is coming to an end, and pretty soon, oh no, you will run out of time there, and you will have to worry about the future! Mean old paperbacks, reminding me about time and how it never stops going and no matter how much you…

24 Comments