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Author: Jenny Hamilton

Really a lot of thoughts on racism: A links round-up

Well, we have come to the end of another week, and as such we must read some links and think about the world. I am writing this post whilst finally watching WandaVision, and you may expect that my next links round-up will contain lots of links about WandaVision, because I am enjoying it tremendously thus far. Also Teyonah Parris is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I gasp every time she smiles. Anyway, have some links! “It’s disingenuous to say their race doesn’t matter in this world, when the most prominent and numerous people are white.” On the…

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Episode 141 – 2020 SF in Review, with Renay!

Happy (?) New Year, friends! We are not sure what kind of year to say we hope you’re having, because the events of this year so far have been… really shit! But at least there is a new president in office who actually cares about solving the pandemic and getting all our shit back together, and at least there is such things as dogs and cats, both of which continue to be extremely good species. We Jennys will be coming at you with a joint podcast soon! But first, I had the wonderful Renay of Lady Business on the pod,…

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All the Books that Blew My Mind in 2020, Part 1

So it turns out that 2020 was a pretty amazing reading year? I hadn’t really noticed because there were so many other things to occupy my brain, such as the quarantine and the election and the crumbling of American democracy, but in looking back at my reading spreadsheet I discovered that I had read a shocking number of books that needed a place on my Best Of list. There are, in fact, so many that it has necessitated me breaking this post down into two parts. This one covers my reading through like mid-June or something, and represents the number…

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MILLIONS BOOK PREVIEW: A very belated links round-up

Guess what I meant to do for several past Fridays! Yes, the answer is “post a links round-up.” So now we have this very belated links round-up but the good news is that it contains lots and lots of genuinely great content, including the first half of the year Millions book preview! Yay! First and most importantly: The Millions Book Preview! (link) Serial killers are in decline, hooray! (link) “Despite the joys of his irreverence, however, it is all too easy to sink in the morass of sexism, if not outright misogyny, muddying the plots of Vonnegut’s novels.” On the…

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Episode 140 – Holiday Gift Guide 2020 and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half

I have to say, the Poetry Foundation really came for me with one of their recent poems, and I can’t be alone with it so I’m going to quote it for y’all here as a run-up to this actually very chipper and non-insane podcast. I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices; They would be more or…

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Kaveena, Boubacar Boris Diop, trans. Bhakti Shringarpure and Sara C. Hanaburgh

Here’s something that has changed under quarantine: I now place holds on books. I so rarely did it in the olden days! I used to go to the library every Saturday or every second Saturday, and I didn’t need to place holds, because there were always loads of amazing books to read. I would make a list of maybe five specific books that I wanted to get that day, and I’d get them, but then I spent most of my library trip trawling the New Books shelves in every genre. I had a system! Nonfiction first! Then regular fiction! Then…

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Two Words: Book. Concierge. (A Links Round-Up)

The NPR! Book! Concierge! Has arrived! It has arrived to gladden our days. I have been parceling it out to myself bit by bit to make it last, because NPR Book Concierge comes but once a year. When I have gone all the way through it, I will not have it again for so many years. Here it is (link). Be blessed with its bounty. Watch Ted Lasso, please. I beg you will watch Ted Lasso. I am saying this for your own good, because I want you to feel positive emotions in your life, and frankly where else can…

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November Reading, Plus an Advert for Ted Lasso

We made it through another month! And this one was a really hard one to make it through, on account of we had to wait for days and days for the election results, and then there was this whole stupid slow-motion effort to pretend that the election didn’t have results, and what with one thing and another I have aged approximately two hundred years. The true headline of November has been my discovery of the sweetest and dearest sitcom since The Good Place got me through the 2016 election. It is — and I do not say this lightly —…

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Review: Phoenix Extravagant, Yoon Ha Lee

When Jebi signs up to take the examination for the Ministry of Art, they expect two things: a job, and for their sister Bongsunga to get really really mad at them. Which she does: The Razanei government oppresses Jebi and Bongsunga’s people, the Hwaguk, and the last thing Bongsunga wants is to see her sibling assimilating. She throws Jebi out, and the next thing they know, they’ve been forcibly recruited to paint the magical sigils that power the Razanei army’s automatons. Most particularly, Jebi has been tasked with finding out what went wrong with the dragon automaton Arazi, which went…

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PODCAST – Episode 139 – Spoopy Books and Kwana Jackson’s Real Men Knit

So, the election was yesterday. When we recorded this podcast, we didn’t know what the election results were going to be. As I write this post, I don’t know what the election results are going to be. Probably as you are reading this, you don’t know what the election results are! But I hope you are being very very gentle with yourself in this, the scariest Halloween week we’ve ever known, and I hope this podcast provides a very small escape. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you…

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