Happy Wednesday, friends! It’s a Reading the End / Spectology crossover event, so we’re talking about crossover books: the books that straddle the boundary between speculative and literary fiction. We welcome Spectology’s Adrian Ryan to chat about our genre-crossing faves, then review Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds. You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you on the go!
Here are the time signatures if you want to skip around.
1:18 – What we’re reading
6:33 – What we’re playing
11:14 – SEA OR SPACE
12:51 – Literary / speculative fiction crossovers
46:23 – Best of All Possible Worlds, by Karen Lord
1:02:24 – What we’re reading next time
What we talked about:
Beneath the World a Sea, Chris Beckett
Spectology’s interview with Chris Beckett
Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James
The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie
Victor Lavalle review of the Marlon James book
Whose Body?, Dorothy Sayers
Strong Poison, Dorothy Sayers
Have His Carcase, Dorothy Sayers
The Clewiston Test, Kate Wilhelm
Super Smash Bros
Breath of the Wild
Baba Is You
China Mountain Zhang, Maureen McHugh
Mission Child, Maureen McHugh
The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
The Book of X, Sarah Rose Etter
The New and Improved Romie Futch, Julia Elliott
Romie Futch discussions on Spectology
Watership Down, Richard Adams
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
the totally fine and normal Electric Literature interview with Carmen Maria Machado
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
White Tears, Hari Kunzru
the Culture Novels, Iain M. Banks
Look to Windward, Iain M. Banks
The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks
Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
The Once and Future King, TH White
“The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson
The Sun-dial, Shirley Jackson
California, Edan Lepucki
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
The City of Devi, Manil Suri
Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson
The Changeling, Victor Lavalle
The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
The Devil in Silver, Victor Lavalle
Broken Monsters, Lauren Beukes
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Natasha Pulley
Judenstaat, Simone Zelitch
Best of All Possible Worlds, Karen Lord
“The Counsellor Crow,” Karen Lord
Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley
You can check out the Spectology podcast here, and follow them on Twitter here.
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.
WHISKEY JENNY: And I’m Whiskey Jenny.
GIN JENNY: And we are here again to talk about books and literary happenings. On today’s podcast, we are going to chat about some books that cross over the genre boundary between speculative and literary fiction. And we’re going to review Karen Lord’s book The Best of All Possible Worlds.
And we are delighted to be joined on the podcast today by one of the hosts of the Spectology podcast, Adrian. Welcome, Adrian!
ADRIAN: Welcome, guys.
GIN JENNY: Thank you so much for coming on. We’re so happy to have you.
ADRIAN: Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to be here. I’ve been listening for a while now. And it’s one of my favorite book podcasts.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, you’re so kind.
GIN JENNY: Well, thank you so much. So we usually talk about what we’re reading before we get into the broader discussion. So Adrian, what are you reading right now?
ADRIAN: So I just finished this morning the book that we’re reviewing for the podcast, which is a little bit embarrassing, because I suggested it for us.
GIN JENNY: Yes. Neither Whiskey Jenny nor I have ever finished the book right before podcast recording.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Definitely not.
ADRIAN: Right. So the other two things, or three—I’m actually reading much more right now than I normally would be, largely because of the podcast that I host, Spectology. But I just got Chris Beckett’s newest book, Beneath the World, a Sea. I had to ship that over from England, because it’s only being released in the UK right now. So I just started that. He was the last author—we read one of his earlier books on our podcast last month, and he actually came on and did an interview and stuff. And so I’m really excited for that book.
But then at the same time I’m also reading Marlon James’s—I always get the colors wrong. It’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf. I always flip those. As well as The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie, which we will all be reading together—I think tomorrow we’re talking about it. So gotta to start and finish that soon.
GIN JENNY: So how are you finding the Marlon James book? Because I’ve really gone back and forth on whether I want to read it.
ADRIAN: It’s intense.
WHISKEY JENNY: Hm.
GIN JENNY: That’s what everyone keeps saying. And I keep being like, do I want that?
[LAUGHTER]ADRIAN: I’m glad I started it as early as I did, because I don’t think I’d be able to just plow through it like I do a lot of books for the podcast.
GIN JENNY: It’s also confusingly long. When you look at it, it looks like a normal-sized book, but then you realize the pages are as thin as can be.
ADRIAN: I have it on my Kindle. So I just keep reading and reading and reading, and I feel like the numbers aren’t ticking up at all. Like I’m not really going anywhere with it. [LAUGHTER] But also it’s very well-written. It’s very good. And you know, Victor LaValle had a really good review about it that encapsulates my very brief thoughts so far, something like 5% of the way through it.
GIN JENNY: I think I read that. So I’ll link to that in the show notes. It was a good review.
ADRIAN: Yeah.
GIN JENNY: Whiskey Jenny, what are you reading?
WHISKEY JENNY: I am reading Whose Body?
GIN JENNY: [GASP] You are?
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: I am.
GIN JENNY: Oh, it’s so anti-Semitic. I apologize.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] So it’s by Dorothy Sayers, and it’s the first in the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. And I think I had started with the first Harriet Vane a while ago. But I thought, oh, I should just start at the beginning of the series now, now that I know that I like the characters. And I do. It’s basically like Jeeves and Wooster solving murder together, which is nice. But yeah. There’s some stuff.
GIN JENNY: So you are now the second of my friends who I have badgered into reading Strong Poison, and then they’ve been like, I’m going to start at the beginning of the series. And they always tell me about it too late for me to be like, wait, no, it’s very anti-Semitic! I really think people should just read the Harriet Vane ones. Not that the other ones are totally without merit. But Whose Body? is extremely skippable.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, we’ll see, once I get to the end, if I keep going with just the Lord Peter ones or just the Harriet Vane ones.
GIN JENNY: All right. But you’ll definitely keep going with something, right?
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, definitely, yeah.
GIN JENNY: OK, good. Good, good, good.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, because I really enjoyed Strong Poison, but I just never followed up on those.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. I’m rereading Have His Carcase right now, actually, which is the second of the Harriet Vane ones.
WHISKEY JENNY: How’s it going?
GIN JENNY: It’s good. That’s not actually what I’m reading. It’s just on my bedside table and I’m reading a few pages a night, trying to make it last.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: You’re reading it, but it doesn’t count. [LAUGHTER] What are you actually reading right now?
GIN JENNY: Actually I just finished it before podcast. I was part of the way through when I was making my notes for this podcast, and then it was a quick read, so I tore right through it. I just finished The Clewiston Test, by Kate Wilhelm, which was described to me as being kind of similar to “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
It’s about a scientist named Anne who’s at a crucial state in an experiment she’s doing with a new kind of painkiller. But she’s recovering from a really rough car accident, so she’s not able to be in the lab for this crucial phase of the experiment. And while she’s there, some of the apes who have been receiving the drug that they’re testing start displaying really intense murderous violence. And as the book goes on, you, the reader, and also the characters start to question whether Anne is regular feminist angry about living in the 1970s, or if she’s tested this drug on herself and is having the same side effects that the chimpanzees are having.
I would warn for this book that there’s definitely ableism and homophobia and some moments of casual racism, as you might expect from science fiction from the ‘70s. There’s a scene where Anne’s husband rapes her, which is not graphic. But what I appreciated is that Anne immediately says, no, that was rape. And I really appreciate that in the context of someone raping their spouse. Because I think even today, let alone in 1976, there’s kind of an assumption of ongoing marital consent. So it was dark but good.
I’m kind of upset that I had never heard of this author before. I went to the library to get this book, and there’s a shelf full of her books, and it turns out she was kind of a major SF writer. She won a Hugo, she was one of the co-founders of the Clarion writing workshop, and I’d never heard of her.
ADRIAN: What was her name again?
GIN JENNY: Kate Wilhelm.
ADRIAN: Yeah, that sounds vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place any of her books. That’s interesting.
GIN JENNY: It’s not like I’m the world’s leading expert in all things SF, but I was just surprised that she was such an important figure that I’d never heard of before. Anyway, the book is The Clewiston Test. Take those trigger warnings that to account if you plan to read it.
And then for something else-ing, we let Adrian pick, and he selected what we’re playing. Mine is kind of a fudging it answer, per uszh, so Adrian, why don’t you kick us off? What are you playing?
ADRIAN: So I’ve been playing a lot of Super Smash Brothers recently, which is a Nintendo game. I have not had a video game console since I was a kid. In middle school and high school I always had one, and then I stopped as an adult. And so I got one again recently. It’s like, oh, I’m a professional with disposable income. Why don’t I do this?
And it’s been an absurd amount of fun. My roommate and I play together, and it’s been a fun bonding experience for us to both be really bad at this game beating up on each other. [LAUGHTER] Or the computer beating up on us, is the way that it works out.
GIN JENNY: That is my own experience with playing video games, for sure.
ADRIAN: And so I’ve been doing that, and then also playing some of Breath of the Wild, is the other game I’ve been playing for that. And that is a Zelda game that is very immersive. And it sometimes feels less like playing a game and more like wandering around the medieval countryside talking to people, which is very fun for me also. It’s meditative almost, to just wander around Hyrule and chat with little NPCs and not really do much of anything.
GIN JENNY: My concern about starting to play video games is that I would never stop and it would take over my life and I would do nothing else forever. Which I’m pretty sure is what would happen. So that’s why I’ve never started.
ADRIAN: Yeah. Definitely the first couple weeks I had to rearrange how I think about screen time and that sort of thing. [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I think I would get obsessive about it.
ADRIAN: Yeah, definitely. Especially the Zelda game was really easy to get obsessive about. The other one you play in these couple minute matches. So you can play a couple of matches, feel like you’ve done something, and then just put it down. As opposed to have to save an entire world, and I can just put hours and hours into doing that.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. Whiskey Jenny, what are you playing?
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, I actually do have a—surprisingly, I do have a video game answer as well.
GIN JENNY: [GASP] What?
WHISKEY JENNY: I know.
GIN JENNY: Oh my gosh, tell me all about it.
WHISKEY JENNY: So our theme song composer Jessie brought into work the other day their Switch, which is a little portable thing.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: Specifically because she wanted to show me and a coworker this game called Baba Is You, which is so cute and charming. It’s a little puzzle game, and there’s words and things that you can rearrange to make different sentences. And the way that the words arranged affect the world of the game. So if you say, like, instead of “Baba is you,” which is this little sheep that’s trying to get the flag, if you say “wall is you,” then you become the wall, and then you can get to the flag that way.
And it’s so cute. And you also end up saying these really weird sentences to yourself. [LAUGHTER] Like, oh no, “text is float,” that won’t work! [LAUGHTER] So we only played it for a little bit in the office, but I loved it so much. And apparently it’s available on one of the however you can play games on your PC. And I’ve been thinking about getting it on that.
GIN JENNY: You definitely should. Look at you, being a gamer.
WHISKEY JENNY: I know, but it was just so cute. And the little sheep makes little noises whenever he moves. [LAUGHTER] It was precious.
GIN JENNY: This is what always happens. People tell me about games and I’m like, that could be fun. I could do that a normal, sane amount. But it’s not true. I couldn’t do it a normal, sane amount, and I just gotta not do it.
WHISKEY JENNY: I think it’s wise that you know yourself so well. What are you playing?
GIN JENNY: So I am fudging this. I really do try to keep the baby talk to a minimum on this podcast, because I know it’s unbearable if you can’t shut up about your affiliated baby. However, my toddler godson has recently started playing imaginative games. And it’s very fascinating because I like seeing the hypotheses he forms about the world. But it’s also weirdly morally clarifying for me.
Like we were playing a game—he likes to play a game where he and I pretend to be bad guys. And he’ll ask me, like, where do bad guys live? What do bad guys do? And the first time you get asked these questions, is a very first thought-best thought situation, because you have to answer the question really quickly or he’ll be like, Jenny, where bad guys live? What bad guys do?
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Why are you hiding this from me?
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: So he asked me where do bad guys live? And I said, oh, they live out of town on a high hill in a fancy house far away from people. They don’t like being around nice people. They want to be alone because they’re scared of having to share their money, because they’re greedy. And it’s fun, because toddlers are very yes-and to play with, because they literally don’t know any information apart from what you tell them. [LAUGHTER] But it’s also been fun to learn that at baseline, with no time to think about it, I really do want to eat the rich.
ADRIAN: I was going to say, that seems like good morals from an early age.
WHISKEY JENNY: Exactly.
GIN JENNY: OK, so Adrian, we forgot to include this on the rundown, so we’re asking you it out of nowhere.
ADRIAN: OK, fun.
GIN JENNY: We like to ask all our guests. Sea or space?
ADRIAN: Oh, this is the hardest possible question you could ask me.
GIN JENNY: There’s no answer that I don’t love. I love the people who immediately have an answer, and they just come out with it so hard. But also love it when people are like, oh. Yeah.
ADRIAN: Especially not having known that there would be surprise questions on the podcast, all of a sudden I feel my whole life flashing in front of my eyes. I’m like, well, I grew up by the sea, but I always wanted to go to space. How do I choose one?
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: But you have to.
ADRIAN: I think space. I think I have to look to the future. And it’s a science—I’m the science fiction guy on this podcast.
GIN JENNY: I was going to say it’s very optimistic of you to think that our future as humans includes space and not the sea.
ADRIAN: Right. Well, you know, metaphorical future, or one possible world, potentially.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: We’re both sea people. But I think we’re reaching a point, Whiskey Jenny, I think we’re at a tipping point where we might be leaning with our podcast guests more heavily into space.
WHISKEY JENNY: I think you’re right. There’s been a late surging space push.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I think there was a heavy sea contingent early on.
WHISKEY JENNY: Mm-hmm. Yeah, things are shifting.
ADRIAN: I mean, if you’d asked me on another day I might have said sea. So don’t count me as a strong space.
GIN JENNY: It’s too late. Your permanent answer is—
ADRIAN: Oh, OK. [LAUGHTER] Does this mean I’m going to space? Is that the end of this?
GIN JENNY: Yup.
[LAUGHTER]ADRIAN: With or without a space suit at this point.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: So what we wanted to do today is talk about some books that straddle the line between speculative and literary fiction. And Adrian, I think you said this is kind of a sweet spot for you, reading-wise.
ADRIAN: Yes, very much. I know I’m like the sci-fi nerdy guy, and I am. But I also like character driven and quiet, contemplative science fiction largely in books generally. And I read a lot of literary fiction as well.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I do, too. But I think my literary fiction sweet spot is when they have slightly speculative elements. Because I also read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and I think that with literary fiction, I tend to like it better if it has some fantastical elements.
ADRIAN: Right. I feel like it’s like genre-y. Maybe not genre itself, but a little bit of genre spice on the food.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I came up with a reasonable number of examples, but then I have a whole bunch of backup examples in case you guys use some of mine.
ADRIAN: Did the same.
WHISKEY JENNY: That’s smart. I just have my eight.
GIN JENNY: Eight!
WHISKEY JENNY: And I’m married to them.
GIN JENNY: Wow.
WHISKEY JENNY: Is eight too many?
GIN JENNY: No. [LAUGHTER]
WHISKEY JENNY: Is that too many? I could cut some.
ADRIAN: I have eight as well, so it’s OK.
GIN JENNY: Oh, great. OK, well I have six, but I have five backups, so I think we should be good.
WHISKEY JENNY: So backups are just about to get promoted.
ADRIAN: Sure. [LAUGHTER] Great. So the first, this is more an author than just an individual book, but I wanted to bring up Maureen McHugh, who is, or was, a science fiction author. She published four or five novels. At this point I don’t think she really writes anymore. She writes the occasional short story, but she runs an alternate reality gaming company. So it’s kind of I Heart Bees style alternate reality game. But her books China Mountain Zhang and Mission Child are just two of my favorite books.
And China Mountain Zhang in particular is this really kind of wild book that’s set in a future where Chinese-style communism has become the dominant ideology and governing structure of America. And it’s mostly about a young gay man over the course of his late 20s, early 30s, just figuring out what he wants to do with his life.
So in some ways it feels like hipster fiction, you know, millennials figuring out what it is that they’re doing. And then in other ways—like, there’s chapters set on Mars. And there’s chapters set in this far future China. I really like it because the structure of it is very like literary fiction, where it’s just about a guy trying to figure out what he’s doing. But it’s set in this fantastical, but also really meaningful setting. And so that’s often the kind of stuff that I like.
WHISKEY JENNY: Cool.
GIN JENNY: Was that one of the books that you gave us as a choice when we were choosing which book we would read for this podcast?
ADRIAN: Yeah. I think I mentioned Mission Child actually as the choice, which is out of print and really hard to find, but probably top five book for me.
GIN JENNY: Oh, wow.
ADRIAN: Yeah, really, really cool book, and I wish it were on ebook so that people could actually buy it. But find a used copy of it. It’s worth it, and it’s like $3 used online.
GIN JENNY: Cool. Whiskey Jenny, do you want to go next?
WHISKEY JENNY: Sure. So the first one I’ll mention is The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. Which I just always immediately loved from the first time I read it.
GIN JENNY: Which is shocking, because you do not like time travel books.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, I don’t think I dislike them quite as much as Friend of the Podcast Ashley.
GIN JENNY: OK. All right.
WHISKEY JENNY: But I do end up asking myself a lot of questions and then getting into a bad feedback loop about, [LAUGHTER] how does the time travel work? How are they not messing with the continuum or whatever? And I think that this book really successfully evaded that trap for me. Because there’s just this one dude, and he’s got this weird medical condition, basically, where every once in a while he gets sucked back into time unwillingly and has to deal with it.
And it’s a love story with a woman that he meets, but he meets her originally as a child, I think, when he’s traveling from the future. And it also somehow successfully isn’t creepy, I didn’t think.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I didn’t think so either.
WHISKEY JENNY: And I think it avoids all those questions, because it’s mostly about the emotional impact that this weird condition has on the two of them. So unsurprisingly, I’m all into the feelings aspects of it. And it’s also just really beautifully written. So it was one of the first ones that popped into my head when I was trying to think, what are the literary books that I already read and having in my stable have those kind of speculative elements? Which was an interesting question, to look back at my bookshelf framing it that way.
GIN JENNY: Me too. At first I thought I had very few examples, and then I couldn’t stop thinking of more and more. [LAUGHTER] I actually wanted to mention, I think that indie fiction does a lot of this. Because I think that oftentimes mainstream publishers are concerned about finding an audience for something like this. So I suspect there’s a lot of interesting crossovery work being done among independent presses that I miss because they don’t have the marketing budget. So if listeners have recommendations from small presses, please let me know.
My first one is—actually I was lucky enough to read an advance review copy of this book that’s coming out in July. It’s called The Book of X, by Sarah Rose Etter. It’s really weird. Roxane Gay and Carmen Maria Machado both blurbed it, which I think gives you a sense of what it is like.
It’s about a woman whose torso, instead of being a smooth, normal torso, is a knot. And there are some other slightly fantastical elements, like her family lives and works in a meat quarry, and they rip meat from the walls of the quarry and sell it.
WHISKEY JENNY: Euch. [LAUGHTER] Oh, that is a visceral image.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] But in general, more like Adrian was saying about the Maureen McHugh book, it’s more about this woman navigating the world and trying to figure out what she wants her life to be while having a body that doesn’t conform to a given set of standards. It’s a very strange and interesting book. I will be intrigued to see what kind of reception it gets when it comes out. It’s very odd. So that’s The Book of X, by Sarah Rose Etter.
ADRIAN: Interesting. That I’m curious about. I might try picking that one up.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
ADRIAN: Speaking of small presses, actually this is a book published by Tin House Press. The author is Julia Elliott. The book is called The New and Improved Romy Futch.
GIN JENNY: Great title.
ADRIAN: Yeah, it’s phenomenal. This is another favorite book of mine, maybe not top five, but high up there. It was I think the third or fourth book that we read for the podcast, too. We read it pretty early on because I was like, I really want to talk about it. It’s sort of a Flowers for Algernon type story, of someone gains more and more mental ability.
But Julia is a gender studies professor in the South and so really writes from this feminist perspective of the internal life of this poor and rural Southern man as he gains these mental powers. And my read of it is very much of this sense of it’s kind of about how class and education in America are really two sides of the same coin. It’s also very gonzo and weird and fun.
One of the things that he does with his newfound mental prowess is to make these sculptures. He’s a taxidermist by trade, and he makes these giant taxidermy panoramas with mechanical elements, and they’re talking about the carceral state and stuff. And it’s really wild and bizarre and weird, and a really fun book. But also Julia—Tin House Press is this literary press, and she has both a Southern Gothic literary and science fiction background, which is really a cool blending of things.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. So my next one is Watership Down.
GIN JENNY: Naw!
ADRIAN: Ooh.
WHISKEY JENNY: I was trying to come up with a cogent argument for why it’s speculative, and somehow I ended up that if we were rabbits, it would be a post-apocalyptic tale. [LAUGHTER] So it’s speculative for rabbits.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Rabbits don’t talk, so it’s still speculative.
[LAUGHTER]ADRIAN: That’s my very first thought, too. [LAUGHTER]
WHISKEY JENNY: I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’ve proved that. They could, just because they never talk to me.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: OK, Frans de Waal, say more about Watership Down.
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, gosh. So we read it for this podcast.
GIN JENNY: We sure did.
WHISKEY JENNY: We ended up just recapping it and not reviewing it at all, because what happens in it is so delightful. But it’s your classic journey story with little stops along the way—much like the book that we read for this podcast. And I really enjoy that structure, of jumping from one adventure to the next. And then it ends with a crazy big satisfying battle against evil, basically. There’s some creepy rabbits, there’s some very nice rabbits. There’s a Russian seagull. [LAUGHTER] It’s great.
I still haven’t watched the Netflix adaptation, though, because I’m so mad that they got rid of Pipkin.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I think you can skip it. It was just OK.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. That cast, though!
GIN JENNY: I know.
WHISKEY JENNY: And I would say overall a theme for mine is going to be—everything I picked, I noticed, is set mostly on Earth, but things are weird. Which is also what I really enjoy about magical realism. I didn’t pick any of those because I didn’t totally feel like it was following the spirit of the rules here, but that’s also a similar thing that really works for me. And there are also real feelings-heavy.
GIN JENNY: Oh yeah, for sure. OK, my next one, shockingly, is a short story collection. Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado. I really like this author because she’s published in speculative fiction magazines as well as literary ones, so I feel like she really leans into the instability of her genre categorization. Her Body and Other Parties is just a super weird collection of short stories. And I often struggle with short story collections by a single author, even though I do read short fiction now. But it’s just a really great, weird, excellent book.
Also I read this interview with her in Electric Literature that starts out seeming like a normal interview, where perhaps she’s being a little stern with the interviewer, but then it kind of takes a turn that I won’t spoil for anyone. But it was just a really positive reading experience. I’ll link to that in the show notes. If you’re not familiar with this author, I think that will give a pretty good sense of what she’s like and what her stories are like.
ADRIAN: Cool. I haven’t heard of her before. You’ve mentioned her twice now, and that sounds really fun.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, no, she’s great. She’s weird as hell. I think, based on what you’ve said of your tastes, I think you would like her.
ADRIAN: I’m a big fan of weird interviews. Great, so my next book is going to be Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, as well as—I think essentially everything Mitchell’s written is genre-y one way or another, whether it’s science fiction or historical fiction or more fantasy.
I guess Cloud Atlas is all of those things. It’s post-apocalyptic, it’s far future, it’s historical, it’s kind of all of the above. Which is one of the reasons I like it so much, the way that he plays with genre, and in a loving way. He’s a literary author who I think is probably more heavily read in genre than in literary fiction, even while he himself is a literary author. And that really shows through.
But meanwhile he also just has some of the best prose of anyone currently writing that I know of. In particular his ability to jump from style to style—like, his stylistic prose is really good, which is hard. I feel like that kind of thing can really easily become cheesy, and it never really feels like that, at least for me. My experience of it is not one of feeling cheesy. Rather it pulls me further into the book, instead of acting as a barrier between me and the book.
And then I think, too, that book had a movie adaptation that I also really love, even though it’s not a particularly well-loved movie or well-reviewed movie. For me, it’s just one of the best.
GIN JENNY: I think I’ve heard mostly bad things about it, so this is surprising news.
ADRIAN: Yeah, I will stan for literally everything to Wachowskis have ever done, including the Matrix sequels, so I’m not objective about this in any way. But I just loved it. It’s so sentimental and sincere, and just beautiful.
WHISKEY JENNY: I have to ask you. What are your thoughts on Jupiter Ascending?
GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER]
ADRIAN: That’s the one I haven’t seen, because I missed it in theaters. And I’ve been saving it to the point I can watch it on a big TV screen somewhere. But I’m going to like it.
GIN JENNY: Whiskey Jenny, you’ve seen Jupiter Ascending or no?
WHISKEY JENNY: I have seen Jupiter Ascending, and I found it really frustrating because it had a lot of elements there that I was like, oh, that’s cool, and this is cool, and this other thing is cool. But then they would go away and they would never get explored, and then it was just Eddie Redmayne yelling, and it was alarming. It would’ve been less frustrating if there hadn’t been so much potential there for me, I think.
GIN JENNY: When it first came out, people were like, this is so stupid. But since then, I think there’s been a bit of a turn on the internet, where now people kind of stan for it even though they think it’s stupid, or because they think it’s stupid. So I think at some point, if someone does a Twitter watch of it or something, that I could watch it at that time and get a huge kick out of it. All right, Whiskey Jenny, what’s your next pick?
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, I’ll do my short story collection after yours, Gin Jenny, is Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link. I’m sure I’ve talked about it on here before. And it actually just was front on my brain because I referred to something as The Beloved—I referred to my bed as The Beloved [LAUGHTER]—in a totally normal and healthy way—and there’s one story in that collection—they’re all like things are sort of weird and creepy and magical or mysterious. But there’s one where—I think this is the same one—the walls have so many layers of paint on them they start moving around and being squishy. And in this story, the house is influencing the family. And the cat is in love with the alarm clock, and so the alarm clock gets referred to as the Beloved of the cat.
So it’s just like, yeah, there’s these really sweet and cute touches in this terrifying story about a house influencing its residents. And I think they’re all like that. They all had this really interesting mix of humor and delight, along with the real current of unease and queasiness running throughout. It’s such an interesting juxtaposition.
GIN JENNY: I still haven’t read that. I really need to.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, you read short stories now.
GIN JENNY: I read short stories now it’s so true.
[LAUGHTER]OK so, surprising no one, my next pick is White Tears, by Hari Kunzru. There are several books on my list that I read first and then liked so much I badgered Whiskey Jenny into reading them for podcast, of which White Tears is one.
It’s about two young white men who record a black man singing in Union Square, a fragment of a song. And they do some audio editing on the recording and make it sound like it’s an old time blues recording. And they release it on the internet and someone immediately gets in touch with them and is like, you shouldn’t have that track. You need to get out. It becomes a ghost story. It is very frightening and also very strange. It’s just completely bananas, and it’s about the history of America and racism in the music industry.
And it is one of the best books that I’ve read in the last few years across the board. And I have pushed on so many people. So that’s White Tears, by Hari Kunzru. And if you haven’t read it yet, you gotta read it. It’s so weird. It’s so good.
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s so scary, but so satisfying.
GIN JENNY: It’s really scary, yeah. Note, though, that I am a coward. So to people who read horror, it might not be that scary.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, keep in mind that I referred to Practical Magic as a scary movie.
GIN JENNY: Oh, yeah, that movie scared me so much when I first—I mean, I’m fine now. [LAUGHTER] I’ve seen it a few times. But yeah, it scared me pretty badly the first time.
ADRIAN: I’ve heard of White Tears, and it’s been on the list for a while. So that’s a very good recommendation.
GIN JENNY: It’s superb.
ADRIAN: So I think I’m going to go further on the science fiction for my next pick, since I haven’t done just a straight sci-fi novel yet. What I will talk about is the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. And I think why I pick him is he’s both a science fiction author and his science fiction novels are very out there space opera science fictiony, but he also wrote a lot of literary novels under just Iain Banks. So he straddled both worlds and had even two different literary identities for the different books that he published.
When I started reading novels again towards the end of college, after I had been doing college work instead for a long time—
GIN JENNY: [SIGH] Yeah.
ADRIAN: He was one of the ones that really sparked my interest. The Culture novels really grabbed ahold hold of me, because they do this great job of being just totally fantastic science fictional—there’s nothing arch about that; It’s this clear love of genre—but also he’s a very good prose writer. He cares about character a lot. And so they’re just really, really good science fiction novels.
And then a few of them, too, are really sad. I think Look to Windward in particular is one of my favorites, because it’s just sad, broken, traumatized people. It’s this big science fiction, space opera, Star Warsy type plot, but at the core of all of them is just this kind of sadness that runs through it. And I find something really touching and beautiful about that, science fiction that can be really emotional and just hold those emotions, instead of, here’s the plot to distract you from feeling anything.
GIN JENNY: Is that a sequential series, or is it a whole bunch of books that are just set in the same world?
ADRIAN: The latter. You can really read them in any order. I usually recommend reading one of the first two published novels first, Player of Games or Consider Phlebas, just because they both act as pretty good introductions to what the heck is going on. And some of the latter books expect a little bit more that you know what’s going on to really fully enjoy them.
WHISKEY JENNY: Cool. OK, I’m going to combine two on my next one.
GIN JENNY: [GASP]
WHISKEY JENNY: I know. I’m such a rebel. But they’re books that I read when I was quite young and I think I imprinted on them, so I wanted to combine them for that reason. And also because I think they both have a lot of questions about how to do the right thing that I also really imprinted on. And they are A Wrinkle in Time and The Once and Future King.
GIN JENNY: Oh! The Once and Future King.
WHISKEY JENNY: They’re both just so interesting to read, I think, as a youth. And there’s certain details of them—I haven’t read them in a while—that have stuck through me, and that I use when looking at things still. There’s such a creepy Stepfordy scene in A Wrinkle in Time, right?
GIN JENNY: It is. I just shuddered. It is, yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: Just that image of all the children bouncing the balls together because they’re being mind controlled to do so is so creepy and horrifying, and something I can’t unsee even though I didn’t even see it happen.
GIN JENNY: It’s a vivid image.
WHISKEY JENNY: Just having that shorthand, I think, for oppression has been really helpful. And then The Once and Future King is pretty obvious about, I think, its moral lessons, because Arthur is literally receiving moral lessons from Merlin, basically. [LAUGHTER] But they’re still really helpful I think. I like when he gets to be animals, and at first he’s really impressed with the ants. Then they go to war and he’s like, oh, maybe war is not so fun. Which is what you should learn as a ruler.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. So my next one is a Shirley Jackson book, because I think she is an almost perfect example of this particular intersection, especially because a lot of us read “The Lottery” in school and are thus a little bit familiar with her to start with. Something you can miss as a school kid reading “The Lottery” is that Shirley Jackson is very funny. She’s good at creating a terrifying mood, but she’s also very funny.
So the book of hers that I chose is one of her lesser known novels—except by people in proximity to me, because I talk about it all the time—which is The Sundial. And it is about this very messed up family living in a big mansion. And the elderly aunt has a vision that the world is going to end and only the people inside the house are going to survive the apocalypse. And at first the family of course is very skeptical, but as time goes on they start getting indications that what she’s saying is true, so they begin to genuinely prepare to be the only people left on earth while their neighbors die around them. It’s so funny, but also, of course, extremely dark. And I just love it.
WHISKEY JENNY: Why is “The Lottery” such a staple of childhood?
GIN JENNY: Because it’s so scary!
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: But why is that the one that we pick to give to children? It’s so horrifying.
GIN JENNY: I think it must be because everyone remembers reading it in school and they’re like, oh my God, remember that? Then they just want to inflict that on the next generation. I certainly do.
WHISKEY JENNY: No!
ADRIAN: I’ve heard of Shirley Jackson and some of these other books, but I’ve actually never even heard of “The Lottery.”
GIN JENNY: [GASP] What!?
ADRIAN: That was never something I read or know about at all.
GIN JENNY: Oh man. [LAUGHTER] I’m going to send you a link after we finish recording.
WHISKEY JENNY: And then imagine you’re 20 years younger and being forced to read this in school with other peers.
[LAUGHTER]ADRIAN: I think there’s a lot of post-apocalypse fiction that fits in this literary fiction, science fiction mash up subgenre. That feels like often the kind of thing that a literary novelist can go in that direction. It’s an easy amount of genre to put it in a literary fiction novel.
GIN JENNY: I definitely agree. My next one is a post-apocalyptic one, too. Ish.
ADRIAN: Right. Cool. Well, I’ll go with one of my post-apocalyptic ones, which is California, by Eden Lepucki. It’s about a young couple who are living in the California rural countryside, because the world was falling apart and so they got out while the getting was good and essentially just live alone in this area. And it’s about them slowly understanding both how to survive in this situation, as well as make contact with some of the other people who are pretty far afield but also do exist.
And one of the things I like about this book is each chapter alternates being from the point of view of either the woman or the man in the relationship. And a lot of what the book is about, the thematic elements of the book, are really about gender, the different roles they take on, also how secrets inside of a relationship work, and how pernicious they are. But then at the same time, it’s this book about survival, and then some other science fiction aspects. I don’t want to spoil it too much, because it’s so powerful reading it directly. But it plays on this cool thing of how we feel inside of relationships sometimes the need to protect the other person, even though it’s supposed to be a partnership. Like, it’s not actually protecting them or helping you, but it feels bad to talk about it.
WHISKEY JENNY: As Gin Jenny has heard me complain about before, I’m a big proponent of telling your person the thing, because it never— [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: Yeah, she gets so mad.
WHISKEY JENNY: Just tell them. Just tell them!
ADRIAN: Right.
WHISKEY JENNY: So I’m excited this book acknowledges that you should always just tell them.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Whiskey Jenny Was Right, by Eden Lepucki. [LAUGHTER]
WHISKEY JENNY: It feels good, thanks. OK, well my next one is also—I picked my next post-apocalyptic one, sort of, which is A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I think we read ages and ages ago on podcast. And it’s nominally set in a future where resources are a lot smaller and there’s a bit more technology, but otherwise it’s regular Earth. And so I think that nod to science fiction is interesting. And also it’s crazy interlinking stories, which is a structure I really like. Within that, there are crazy structures, like the PowerPoint chapter that everyone talks about, which is still pretty cool.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: It is pretty cool. I love when people do stuff like.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. So I appreciate the ambition of that book. I think it’s so strange how we decide which ones are literary and which ones aren’t. But that one is firmly on the literary shelf, even though it has these tendencies.
GIN JENNY: I think a lot of it must have to do with the author’s foregoing publications. I think you kind of get pigeonholed as one kind of writer or another kind of writer.
ADRIAN: Well, I think that’s to the Iain Banks/Iain M. Banks thing. It’s just his middle name, but he still publish under essentially two different names in order to be able to publish these kind of books.
GIN JENNY: OK, so my post-apocalyptic one is The City of Devi, by Manil Suri, which is a book that I really wish I had written about on my blog after I read it. Because I enjoyed it a lot, but I know that a lot of the details have fallen out of my brain since I read it.
But it is a post-apocalyptic story set in India. India and Pakistan are on the edge of nuclear war. A lot of the phone and internet stuff has been disconnected or disabled. The two central characters are Sarita and Jaz, and both of them are looking for Sarita’s husband Karun, who Jaz has been having an affair with.
And what I like about this book, Sarita and Jaz kind of have to team up to find Karun, and I like how kind and gentle the book is about these three people and their relationship. It’s very—I do want to say explicit, because that sounds critical—but it’s explicit about the queer relationship between Karun and Jaz. And I just also think, as a whole, the book does a good job of finding a not-sad tone for the apocalypse. Which I think could potentially feel tonally jarring, but in this case really worked for me, because it is truly about the relationships among these three people. And also it’s funny, it’s weird. I liked it so much.
It’s the third in a—not a trilogy where it’s sequential, but it’s the third in a set of three companion novels, and I really need to go back and read the other two. So that’s The City of Devi, by Manil Suri.
ADRIAN: That does sound really interesting.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, I don’t think I ever heard of that.
ADRIAN: No. I’m going to pick one more, and then maybe throw in some honorable mentions at the very end, if that’s not breaking the format too much.
WHISKEY JENNY: No, I like that.
ADRIAN: I feel like I’m asking a lot.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, like it, too.
WHISKEY JENNY: No, no, no. I have some that I was like, just in case no one else mentions them, I want to make sure these get mentioned. So yeah, we can do like a Hall of Fame at the end.
[LAUGHTER]ADRIAN: Good. Because I’m actually picking one that’s not on the list originally, but I realized, I can’t believe I didn’t mention this. And it’s called Wittgenstein’s Mistress, by David Markson. I want to say it was written in the ‘70s, although I could be a little bit off on that. But he was kind of this post-modern experimental type writer writing in like the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s. And this book is a post-apocalyptic novel written as the diary of the last woman on earth.
And the story is essentially, she wakes up one day and everyone else is gone. There’s just no other human beings. I think or even other mammals on earth or anything. They’re all just kind of gone.
GIN JENNY: [GASP] No!
ADRIAN: And it’s her writing this diary of just her every day writing whatever she wants to write about. And that’s the stylistic experimental thing, is it’s not a story necessarily. It’s rather her just talking to herself essentially, years after this has happened. So she’s gone a little bit crazy, right? I mean, she has not had other human beings to talk to for years. She was a college professor, so it’s her both talking about what has happened in her life before the event, what’s happened since the event, as well as just thinking out loud about philosophy and literary theory and all these other sorts of things.
And I’m realizing as I’m saying this, this sounds utterly insufferable. And maybe it is. But I was blown away by this book. I was blown away by how it’s on the one hand so esoteric, and on the other hand so readable. Maybe this is the anxiety disorder speaking, but really it’s in some ways a kind of a relatable fear almost. [LAUGHTER] Like, what if I am actually completely alone? Which can be both a fear and a fantasy sometimes, of like, oh man, what if I could just be totally alone. It contains both aspects of that in the story.
And so I feel like a lot of post-modern experimental, whatever you want to call it fiction has a lot of genre-y elements.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I agree.
ADRIAN: This is one of my favorites of that thing.
WHISKEY JENNY: Gosh, that sounds fascinating.
ADRIAN: I do want to say, it’s been like five years since I read it, so I don’t want to give it a full-throated recommendation. Maybe it’s bad now. I don’t know.
GIN JENNY: That’s always the caveat one has to issue.
ADRIAN: But I liked it at the time a lot.
WHISKEY JENNY: So my last one is another one we read for a podcast, The Changeling, by Victor LaValle. I think all of the genre stuff that we’ve ended up reading on this podcast has been a rip-roaring success, including this one. I found it super scary, but again, I’m a coward.
GIN JENNY: I’m a chicken. I also found it scary, yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: And it obviously plays with the changeling myth. I never know what’s a spoiler in this book and what’s not. But in the beginning of the book, you don’t know if changelingism is really happening or not. And it’s real scary, and an adventure—a scary adventure happens. It also plays with a lot of questions of racism and inequality.
GIN JENNY: And it’s also set in New York, and it’s really fun New York City adventure.
WHISKEY JENNY: It is, yeah. It makes use of real spaces but makes them terrifying. [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: Yeah, sure does.
ADRIAN: Is that set in modern New York?
WHISKEY JENNY: Yes
GIN JENNY: Yes. And actually, very often I’ll read books set in New York that do not feel at all consonant with my own experience of living there, because they’re about very rich people. But The Changeling really felt—I was like, yes, this is what New York is like.
ADRIAN: One of his novels, which I didn’t choose but was going to be an honorable mention for me, The Ballad of Black Tom, I had those same experiences with it. Even though it’s set in the deep past, it still felt like, oh, this is a more relatable New York than books written now about New York. This is more relatable than The Goldfinch is, for instance.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I actually also had a Victor LaValle book as a runner up. It was The Devil in Silver, which is the one that’s set in a mental institution.
WHISKEY JENNY: Wow. Way to go, Victor LaValle.
ADRIAN: Yeah, he’s good.
GIN JENNY: OK, my last one, nobody will be surprised, is The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara. I have been heard to talk shit about this author’s sophomore novel, A Little Life.
WHISKEY JENNY: [LAUGHTER] What?!
GIN JENNY: And I stand by that. [LAUGHTER] Whiskey Jenny has really borne the brunt of this.
WHISKEY JENNY: No, I really enjoy it, though.
GIN JENNY: But The People in the Trees was her first book. And I reread it recently, and it was still just an incredible reading experience for me. It’s the pretend memoirs of this fictional scientist who goes to an island in, I think, Polynesia. And he finds these turtles that if you eat the meat of the turtles, it massively prolongs your life. But as time goes on you lose more and more mental capacity.
So the book is about him making this discovery, and then it deals with the pharmaceutical industry swarming these islands and destroying the way of life there. It later comes out that this scientist, who has, of course, become very prominent for discovering these turtles, he is disgraced because it comes to light that he sexually abuses children.
I really don’t remember what the reception of this book was when it came out compared to A Little Life, which I heard a lot about—probably because I was so mad at it. But The People in the Trees really remains one of my favorite books, and reading it was such a weird and startling and exciting experience.
WHISKEY JENNY: It was unlike anything that I have read.
GIN JENNY: It is. And I can’t really explain why. I can’t pinpoint any one element of it where I’m like, oh, no one has ever done this before. But reading it still felt incredibly new.
ADRIAN: There’s something almost magical sounding about that description.
GIN JENNY: I mean, it was really an astonishing reading experience. I read a bunch of it—I was visiting New York. I was sitting in Whiskey Jenny’s office waiting for her to get done with work, and I was like, I can never leave this office. I’m just going to be reading this book forever.
WHISKEY JENNY: This is my life now.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: All right, so do people have honorable mentions that they want to bring up?
WHISKEY JENNY: Yes. Adrian, hit it.
ADRIAN: Sure. The two that I didn’t pick because I had already mentioned them with what you’re reading, Red Wolf, Black Leopard, by Marlon James—I mean, he’s a Pulitzer Prize–winning author doing a fantasy series. And Victor LaValle was the other one, and I didn’t choose that just because it’s a novella, and I haven’t read any of his actual novels.
Then the last one, which I also mentioned, is Chris Beckett. He’s written some literary fiction, short stories in particular. But I think he writes genre fiction that is very much about the psychological reality of the characters and exploring that. I just really like that.
GIN JENNY: Cool. Whiskey Jenny?
WHISKEY JENNY: Well, I feel like listeners should have a pool on whenever I mention these books. But it’s The Night Circus and Station Eleven.
GIN JENNY: I was going to say, where’s Station Eleven? Whiskey Jenny has not mentioned it and it’s very confusing.
WHISKEY JENNY: I didn’t want to steal it if you were going to mention it, but yeah, those are both some of my favorite books. Although in researching this topic, I did see that Emily St. John Mandel does not consider Station Eleven science fiction and that—
GIN JENNY: OK. OK.
WHISKEY JENNY: That sounded a little elitist to me, and I was like, all right, Emily.
[LAUGHTER]ADRIAN: I have maybe a spicy take on this, which is—
GIN JENNY: Oh boy.
ADRIAN: A lot of science fiction authors do the same thing in the other direction.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I don’t like that either.
ADRIAN: I agree the literary snobbishness is there, but it’s also here on this other side. Because that’s my side, I always want us to do better.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I think I’m on both sides, so I’m mad at both sides all the time.
[LAUGHTER]So I have five honorary mentions. I’m so sorry. They are The Devil in Silver, by Victor LaValle; Broken Monsters, by Lauren Beukes; The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead; The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, by Natasha Pulley; and Judenstaat, by Simone Zelitch. And those are all really good, and feel free to get at me on Twitter and I will tell you all about them.
So Adrian, you picked us a book this week. What did you choose for us?
ADRIAN: I chose The Best of All Possible Worlds, by Karen Lord, who is an author from Barbados—or at least she lives in Barbados now. I don’t know if she was born there. And this is a book that my co-host recommended to me a little while ago. And then we had another Caribbean science fiction author on the podcast, Tobias Buckell, and he recommended it. And so it’s been this book that’s been floating around with a bunch of different recommendations, and so I finally wanted to get a chance to read it.
And it was interesting. It was not what I expected it to be in any way. I’m curious, what did you two think about it?
GIN JENNY: Well, so the plot of the book is that the protagonist, Grace, lives on this planet called Cygnus Beta. And this group of people comes there as refugees, the Sadiri, because their planet has been destroyed. And then yeah, it was extremely not what I expected. It was very—like Whiskey Jenny mentioned, like Watership Down, it was very episodic. And it was about them taking journeys to all these different places, and having little side quests at all these different places.
I liked it. I had some reservations, but overall I thought it was just a very, very enjoyable read.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. I was not expecting it to turn into basically a road trip, and then it did.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: It almost felt sort of Star Trek-y where each episode has its own little self-contained adventure and there’s a lot of tonal differences between one adventure and the next. But overall it felt like a very—I’m talking about Next Generation, which is the only Star Trek I’ve seen.
ADRIAN: It is both very enjoyable, but I think I also had certain reservations. It was much more episodic than I expected it to be. I think I have sometimes a harder time with those types of novels. Also the main character love story, the main meta-arc through the whole thing, didn’t work as well for me. I never fully bought into them falling in love, Grace and the other main character whose name I just can’t even pretend to pronounce.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Gosh, how did I feel about the central romance? I think that I mostly liked it. It was a little weird that his people don’t kiss. And they were like, well, we can do other stuff besides kissing. And I was like, like what, though?
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: They hold hands, right?
GIN JENNY: They hold hands, yeah.
ADRIAN: Well, they mind meld through holding hands.
GIN JENNY: Any time someone’s like, we’re mind melding and it’s romantic, I’m out the door. [LAUGHTER] Whiskey Jenny, what did you think of the romance?
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, I think the romance mainly worked for me. It’s just the overall constant shifting of tone was a bit more tough for me. In all caps, at one point in my notes I wrote, “WHAT TONE DO YOU WANT?” I just could not get a handle on it.
I think partly it’s intentional, because you’re going from, some of the adventures are scary, and some of them are kind of funny. But in relation to that, it was hard for me to switch to, OK, now we’re doing the romance story part of it. But you know, I was happy towards the end. I really appreciated that eventually our guy admits that the Sahiti aren’t better than anyone else. Because I was struggling that in the beginning.
GIN JENNY: Ooh, me too.
WHISKEY JENNY: So I liked that he got with someone who wasn’t Sahiti.
GIN JENNY: It’s Sadiri, right?
WHISKEY JENNY: Is it? Sorry, Sadiri. But I didn’t like that she’s kind of Special One-y. You know, she’s not Sadiri, she has kind of similar powers. And that made it undermining, a little bit, of the lesson I think that he has to learn to accept people different from him, I suppose.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: But for the other team relationships, I loved getting to know all the team and their dynamic. And obviously, as always, wish there were more of the team building and the team grudging respect.
ADRIAN: I totally agree with that. I did like the team dynamic. Most of the other relationships really worked for me, which was why the main romance not working as well as I wanted it to, it’s frustrating. It’s not that it’s bad. It’s that I’m frustrated it’s not as good as some of the other stuff that I really liked in it.
On the one hand, it was like nice to have the non-binary character in the novel.
GIN JENNY: I’m so glad you brought this up. Yeah. Go ahead.
ADRIAN: And on the other hand, the lack of using any pronouns whatsoever, and the way the other characters treated them, just felt awkward. Even Grace was like, oh, I know what gender they really are at one point. And I really didn’t like that.
GIN JENNY: Yes. I hated that.
WHISKEY JENNY: No.
ADRIAN: They don’t have pronouns at all and so the actual writing about them almost never actually feels being about them, in this weird way. They almost get erased from the plot, because instead of, “Lian adjusted their collar,” it’s just, “Lian adjusted the collar.” And all of a sudden they disappear a little bit in the writing.
GIN JENNY: It irritated me, too. I think the book uses they pronouns for them when they’re very, very, very first introduced. And also, the narrative several times implies that being non-binary also means being asexual most of the time, which was a weird thing to suggest. And since there’s no other non-binary characters, and there’s no other asexual characters, it just feel like a weird representative choice. It made me uncomfortable.
And I liked the character, and I wanted to see more of them. They were nice. They were nice, and kind, and tried hard, like everyone.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. And so teasing. I liked how teasing they were. Kind of dry and sarcastic.
I feel like nearly all people in this book were heterosexual. And for a book so focused on, I don’t know, bonding rituals, it seemed weird that the question never even came up of, well, what do you guys do if you don’t fall in love with a woman, but you fall in love with a man and you’re a man? That just never even got addressed. And I also was like, is no one in this world gay? What’s going on here?
ADRIAN: And that would have been a really interesting conflict, having—it’s mostly men, and there’s this feeling like, oh, we need to help bring our culture forward. And what about the gay Sadiri? How do they feel about their need to also breed, and the societal constraints around that and just the practical constraints around that could have been a really interesting view of the world.
And I actually thought that’s where they were going with the main character. Like, oh, they keep making all these jokes about him and Grace getting together, but really the problem is that he doesn’t actually love women. And then that wasn’t it at all. It wasn’t even close to that. I was like, OK, I totally misread this thing. But I would’ve been interested in this other take on it.
GIN JENNY: There was also a thing that was said that Sadiri men have to take a wife or they become damaged and dangerous, which I hated so much. [LAUGHTER] I really feel like that plays into some ugly tropes about men and sex, and also women being civilizing forces for men. So that was not great. And again, very heteronormative. One man, one woman, always have to pair off.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. There was a fleeting reference to, A, to polyamory at the end, and to her mom getting with the mom’s female neighbor. But it was just at the end, and it was like, well if this has been in this world this whole time, how is this the first time it’s coming up?
GIN JENNY: That’s a great question.
ADRIAN: Even that had this element of her mom is like, oh yeah, I’ve fallen in love with this woman, and I have convinced her to leave her husband.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Yes.
WHISKEY JENNY: You’re totally right. That is a great point.
ADRIAN: I was like, wait, are we supposed to be rooting for her? I’m not quite sure how I feel about this.
WHISKEY JENNY: And she also sounded like she was doing it just for the apartment, which was weird. [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: I mean, we’ve all lived in New York.
[LAUGHTER]ADRIAN: That was relatable.
Overall though, I mean there’s a lot of criticism. I did enjoy the book. It was definitely fun the whole way through. And the world it built was—I liked how textured and diverse and interesting these different societies that could coexist with each other were.
GIN JENNY: I also thought that overall—I don’t want to say it was low stakes, but I did get the feeling that it was a book about a bunch of people who are trying to make life better. And everyone pretty much is trying. And the book is really about hope and recovery, and it is suggested that people can recover from stuff.
And so it was notable to me that one of the early episodes of the book is that Grace goes to visit her sister, and they realize that Grace’s brother-in-law, her sister’s husband, is controlling the people around him with psionic abilities. And obviously that’s a really tough thing for Grace and for her sister family. But when you see them later, even though they’re still dealing with the after effects of that, it’s clear that everyone is going to get through this. There’s a plan in place. It’s under control. Things are going to get better, because the people on Cygnus Beta are committed to making things better. And that was a really lovely general theme for the book.
ADRIAN: Yeah, there’s something Utopian in the way that, oh, society actually came together and was like, this is a bad situation, and we will help the people for whom it’s bad. Which is always nice.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. And I don’t think she was too starry-eyed about what humans are able to accomplish. Because they visit a society that has slaves, and by the end of the book, that hasn’t yet been resolved. There’s pushback to making changes in that society.
So I don’t think that Karen Lord has illusions about everyone being perfect in the future. But I just liked that most of the time, most people were trying.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, I agree. And that was really lovely.
I’m glad we’re talking about the brother-in-law character now, because I had a real hard time with him. I think I already, probably more than an average reader, really dislike reading about mind control, which is what he was doing. So I found the fact that he was doing that to his wife and his kids and his wife’s sister really, really horrifying. Like, that’s a horrifying abusive situation. And then the sister just leaves and is like, well, back to the next adventure.
And I was still like, wait, is your sister OK? Because they don’t even totally tell you that they got away, and now they’re talking to the authorities, and he’s in jail, until several adventures later. And I kept being like, but what is going on with that situation? So I appreciated that it was treated as, we can recover from this and everyone’s going to be OK. But I almost wish it hadn’t been quite so flippant about it. Because I was really freaked out by that. It was super gross.
ADRIAN: This is my general problem with the episodic nature of these kinds of novels, which is that I often have this feeling of I wish we could go deeper into fewer stories. And it’s not necessarily that I think that the author is being flippant, so much as just the tone of these really episodic novels can feel jarring when you move from chapter to chapter.
Especially there’s the one chapter where Grace and the other Sadiri woman. When Grace can’t remember what’s happening in the very end of the novel, you realize they’ve been assaulted, and that’s triggered this inability for her to remember. That chapter just ends with this scene of this assault, and then it’s the next chapter, and everything’s going hunky dory for that. That was so jarring to me.
I guess if I had put the book down and then picked up the next chapter later, if it were a TV show where it’s the next episode, that’s one thing. But I was just reading, and I was like, wait, this isn’t resolved.
GIN JENNY: I think it’s interesting how we each had a strong reaction to a very different one. Because the one for me that I found it difficult to suspend disbelief that they could just move on to the next episode is the one where they go to a place and it turns out that the whole palace is run by slave labor. I mean, that was the one to me where I was like, well, you can’t just leave.
Grace goes out on a limb to make things better, which was good. And I appreciated that. But then there’s not really a ton of consequences for the team, or for the people owning slaves. So that was the one for me where I was like, I don’t think you can just walk away from that.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, definitely. And I think that the Fergus character—who, A of all, I just wanted so much more information about. He seems like maybe a catcher with a heart of gold. I don’t know. They didn’t let me find out, but I feel like I could have fell in love with him. [LAUGHTER] But he, I think, is the most upset about this legitimately horrifying situation. But it’s kind of portrayed as he’s a hothead and taking it too seriously. So I was really cheering him on when he was yelling at everyone about how we can’t just let this happen. So I was glad that at least there was one character who felt that way.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, for sure.
WHISKEY JENNY: I feel like we just said a whole bunch of bad things about this book. But overall I did—you know. There were a lot of good things, too. Did you guys have a favorite adventure?
GIN JENNY: Oh, a favorite adventure. Oh, I liked the one where they went to—OK, so I’m spoiling—
WHISKEY JENNY: Wait, can I guess?
GIN JENNY: Oh. Oh, yes. Oh, you’re going to guess, because I’m so predictable. Yes, go ahead.
WHISKEY JENNY: Is it the creepy fairies?
GIN JENNY: It was the creepy fairies.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yay!
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I can’t guess your favorite adventure, because there wasn’t one with a catcher with a heart of gold. [LAUGHTER] But it was the creepy fairies, and it’s because one thing I really loved about this book is that it makes it clear how thin the line between science and magic is. Because even some of the more quote-unquote science things, like psionic abilities, that’s just magic. You’re just describing magic. So I liked it that they got to the fairies and it was like, and now, some magic.
[LAUGHTER]What was y’all’s favorite adventures?
ADRIAN: I think actually the little elephants and the Shangri-La magical monks thing.
GIN JENNY: I also liked that one. Especially the tiny elephants.
ADRIAN: I’ll never not love magic monks in a hidden space pocket. Whatever it is. That’s my version of fairies for you, I think.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: It is actually quite similar. As I was reading it, I was like, this is kind of like fairies. And then there were actual fairies, and my allegiance shifted.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Gosh, what was my favorite? You know what, I think I enjoyed the one where they saw the play and had to foil a murder plot.
GIN JENNY: Oh, that was really fun! That was a really fun one. That was a good little set piece.
WHISKEY JENNY: I think at first I was like, how is this related to what else is going on? And then just decided it was not, and that I was going to have a good time entirely. And then I did. And there’s a murder about to happen onstage before their very eyes, and they foil it because Grace senses it. And it was really fun. A fun actress character that they save gives Grace a dress.
ADRIAN: Anything that involved clothes or shopping, or there was one chapter where Grace and her friend go shopping together. And I loved all that stuff.
GIN JENNY: Oh my gosh, I loved that, too.
WHISKEY JENNY: I am sorry, one last thing. I am a little disappointed that when they go to the polar world and they’re like, huh, it’s weird. I wonder why it’s so deserted, there was never secret monsters or something. I really wanted there to be secret monsters.
GIN JENNY: I was hoping for a recurrence of the sea leopard that we met in Ernest Shackleton’s book.
WHISKEY JENNY: The scariest thing I’ve ever heard.
[LAUGHTER]ADRIAN: My problem with that was that they’re underground in volcanic caverns. There’s an earthquake that causes a shift of rocks that opens up a thing, and their response is like, ooh, let’s go through the hole, not, let’s get out of here.
GIN JENNY: Oh my God, right?
[LAUGHTER]ADRIAN: And then later someone says, it was nobody’s fault. It’s like, no! It was their fault. They did the wrong thing.
GIN JENNY: It was extremely their fault. And then when some of the people in their group get trapped underground, they’re like, oh, how could that have happened? You jerks!
WHISKEY JENNY: Because there’s an earthquake underground!
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I could not believe that they continued. Including the pregnant lady continues for such a long time before somebody is convinced that she should leave.
WHISKEY JENNY: But just the pregnant lady.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Oh, God.
WHISKEY JENNY: So really that monster was within them all along.
[LAUGHTER]ADRIAN: The monster is hubris, really.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Well, this is a good pick. I enjoyed it. And I would like to read more—despite my reservations, I would like to read more stuff by Karen Lord. Which is good, because she has a book coming out later this year.
ADRIAN: Yeah, and she has some short stories that I had read earlier that I liked.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. She had a story reprinted in Lightspeed in December of last year that I loved called “The Counsellor Crow.” And it’s in the form of a scientific report about this specific kind of crow. And it is really creepy and really, really good.
ADRIAN: That sounds cool.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. And I like corvids, so I was super into it for that reason, as well. OK, Whiskey Jenny, what are we reading next time?
WHISKEY JENNY: We are reading Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley. It is the first in a series of books by the detective main character Easy Rawlins. It is set in ‘40s. I think it’s just a classic of the mystery genre. Easy is a black man and a war veteran, and then he also solves some crimes. It was written in the ‘90s, I think, and sort of noiry. But I was hoping to sneak it in, maybe, as a noir book that you might like. I don’t know, we’ll see. And you did say you wanted to try to read some more mysteries, so.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I was just going to say, I have casually started to try and read a few more mysteries. Because it is a genre I really don’t know, and so I’m hoping to slightly change that this year.
WHISKEY JENNY: I’m also cheating a little bit because I’m reading it for book club.
GIN JENNY: No, I really endorse that. You have too many book clubs.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: I’m so sorry.
GIN JENNY: Well Adrian, thank you so much for coming on. It was such a pleasure to have you.
ADRIAN: Me too.
WHISKEY JENNY: Thank you.
GIN JENNY: Where can the people find you online?
ADRIAN: So the podcast that I host is Spectology. It’s at Spectology.com. We also have @spectologypod on Twitter. I don’t do any other social media.
Yeah, and I think that’s it. Like I said, next month—I don’t know when this goes out, but the first Tuesday in May, you guys will be on our podcast, too, and on for two episodes. So I’m really looking forward to that.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, and we’ll be reading and discussing The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie. So if that interests you, hop over and see us. This podcast is going to go live on May 1, so it should be pretty close.
ADRIAN: Great.
WHISKEY JENNY: This has been the Reading the End bookcast with the demographically similar Jennys, and Adrian, thank you again, so much. You can visit the blog at readingtheend.com. You can follow us on Twitter @readingtheend. We’re both on Goodreads as Whiskey Jenny and Gin Jenny. And you can email us—please do, we love hearing from you—at readingtheend@gmail.com. If you like what we do, you can become a podcast patron at Patron.com/readingtheend. And if you’re listening to us on iTunes, please leave us a review.
And until next time, a quote from The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. “I can hear music leaking out of the bar. The abandoned ghost train track looms over the street in the sodium vapor glare, and as I open the door, someone starts to blow a trumpet and hot jazz smacks me in the chest.”
[GLASSES CLINK] [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. [BEEP]WHISKEY JENNY: So I have a couple of questions. [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: Adrian, behind the scenes—
WHISKEY JENNY: It’s now question time.
GIN JENNY: Behind the scenes glimpse into podcasting. The most cutting out of anything in this podcast is Whiskey Jenny asking me super specific questions, me being completely unable to answer them, and then I just cut the whole thing out.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Well, here we go. It’s because that’s the kind of reader I am. I’m not able to let things go. I just need to learn to let things go, but until then—
GIN JENNY: And the kind of reader I am is very inattentive, so I’m never able to answer. So I just sound like a dummy.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Adrian, maybe you’ll be able to answer.
ADRIAN: Yeah, we’ll see.
GIN JENNY: I don’t know.
WHISKEY JENNY: So—
[BEEP]ADRIAN: I don’t know. [LAUGHTER] Now I’m second guessing my own understanding of this.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I mean, this is every time. She always asks good questions, and I’m always like, uh?
[BEEP]