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Author: Jenny Hamilton

THE MILLIONS BOOK PREVIEW IS HERE: A Links Round-Up

That’s all I have to tell you this morning. THE MILLIONS BOOK PREVIEW IS HERE. GET PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMPED. THE MILLIONS BOOK PREVIEW. SIREN EMOJI. Intisar Khanani discusses her journey from self-publishing to traditional publishing. (If you haven’t read her books yet, you should do it now! I love her!) It’s good to change your opinion! On not widening the feminist generation gap. Why do women writers hate themselves? Maybe we’re asking the wrong question. YA author Dhonielle Clayton (her book The Belles is coming out later in the year!) talks about what sensitivity readers do, and why they aren’t nearly enough.…

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Future Home of the Living God Kept Me Up at Night

I didn’t go into Louise Erdrich’s latest novel Future Home of the Living God with the expectation that it would leave me so anxious about The Future that I had to read half of Archer’s Goon just to get myself to sleep. But you can see that this is my own error. Cedar Songmaker is pregnant at a time when evolution has begun to run backward. She visits her biological Ojibwe family to inquire about any potential medical issues, but has yet to tell her adoptive Minnesota liberal parents that she’s expecting. As she’s wrestling with all of this, the…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep. 95: 2017 in Review

It’s the start of the New Year, which means Whiskey Jenny and I get to do one of our very favorite podcasts: The year in review! We look back at what we read for podcast and what we read for pleasure; run down some of our bests and worsts of the year; revisit our 2017 resolutions to see how we did; and make awesome new resolutions for 2018. You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you on the go! Episode 95 Here are the time signatures if you…

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It’s Been Too Long Since My Last: Links Round-Up

Oops, the holidays happened and I forgot to post links round-ups. I know you have all been suffering terribly without them. My hope is that you improved the shining hour by catching up on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and The Good Place, my two favorite shows on TV. But if you just moped around a-waiting, here’s the goods at last. Black women have largely been left out of the conversation about harassment (quelle surprise). Rebecca Carroll talks about her experience of racist belittlement from Charlie Rose. On the state of Kentucky and the borders of the South. Gillian Flynn writes about how…

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A Skinful of Shadows Is Decidedly Unsettling

I bid farewell to 2017 by watching the Australian show Cleverman (all about an indigenous superhero fighting for an oppressed people) and reading Frances Hardinge’s latest book A Skinful of Shadows. It’s about a girl with the ability to carry ghosts inside her, and the aristocratic family that wants to use her as a storage facility for a whole passel of hostile ancestors. Every time Makepeace tries to escape, the Fellmotte family drags her back again — until their involvement in the English Civil War gives her the leverage that might gain her her freedom. She is also possessed by…

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2017 Reading in Review

Well, 2017 was awful. And Trump’s still going to be president in 2018, so my hopes for the upcoming year are not that high. On the other hand, I’ve reached a sort of equilibrium with the family members who dumped me, so I won’t have to relitigate that whole mess in the upcoming year (said Jenny optimistically). And I’ve seen so much bravery and ferocity from people I know: Y’all stay inspiring me. With that said, I had a pretty terrific reading year in 2017. I encountered some new instant favorites, books I loved so much I shoved them at…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep. 94: Cozy Reads for Winter Nights, plus Tell the Truth Shame the Devil

I hope all the Christmas celebrators out there had wonderful Christmases! It’s Wednesday, and me and Whiskey Jenny are back to talk about the books we like to read when the weather turns chilly. We have a lot of thoughts about how this type of reading differs from comfort reading. Then we turn to Melina Marchetta’s first novel for adults, Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil, about which we each went on a dramatic emotional journey. You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you on the go!

Episode 94

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

1:00 – What We’re Reading
4:50 – Serial Box Book Club
10:53 – Cozy reads for winter nights
28:02 – Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil, Melina Marchetta

Books Discussed This Episode

The Skriker, Caryl Churchill
Whipping Girl, Julia Serano
The Templars, Dan Jones
Geek Actually (episodes 5 and 6)
Sunshine, Robin McKinley
Jo Nesbo
Robert Galbraith
Miss Marple mysteries, Agatha Christie
A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong, Cecilia Grant
A Curious Beginning, Deanna Raybourn
Ada. or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov
The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton
City on Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg
Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil, Melina Marchetta

Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. 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

If you want to read a transcript, check it out under the cut!

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Something on Sunday, 12/17

STAR WARS. STAR WARS. STAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR WARS. I saw Star Wars and I was INTO IT, and also the characters all ended up, oh let’s say they all ended up where I wanted them to be. Let’s just say that. Please @ me on Twitter so we can talk about it. I loved it. Happy about: DOUG JONES WON ALABAMA. DOUG JONES WON ALABAMA. I’m so happy for the Dem voters in Alabama, who have worked hard and who deeply deserve this. White liberals, especially in the South, should remember this victory and spend as much time as we can in…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep. 93: 2017 Holiday Gift Guide

Sorry this is so late! I somehow completely blanked on running final filters on our podcast last night, even though it was completely edited and ready to go, so it had to wait until this evening. HAPPY HOLIDAYS ANYWAY, and I hope that those of you who wrote to use via our Holiday Gift Guide can get a few ideas from amongst our many recommendations. You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you on the go!

Episode 93

Our Own Personal Gift Guides

Gin Jenny: Eyeglasses chain from Leslie’s Lanyards on Etsy

Whiskey Jenny: Litographs temporary tattoos

Gin Jenny: Black Sails on DVD (greatest show of our time)

Whiskey Jenny: P. much anything from Out of Print

Gin Jenny: Milk Makeup Ubame mascara

Whiskey Jenny: some kind of local CSA!

Gin Jenny: About: Blanks notebooks

Whiskey Jenny: Adorable salt and pepper shakers like these boat ones

Gin Jenny: Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey

Whiskey Jenny: Tombow markers

Holiday Gift Guide Recs

Claire’s dad

In the Woods (first in Dublin Murder Squad series), by Tana French
Fearless Jones series by Walter Mosley
The Bat (first in Harry Hole series), by Jo Nesbo
Sea of Poppies (first in Ibis Trilogy), by Amitav Ghosh
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

Ellen’s older daughter

The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
Ray Bradbury short stories
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins

Ellen’s younger daughter

Mars Evacuees, Sophia MacDougall
Dealing with Dragons, Patricia C. Wrede
Greenglass House, Kate Milford
Danny the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl
Cinder, Marissa Meyer

Ellen herself!

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty
The Passage, Justin Cronin
Sorcery and Cecelia, Caroline Stevermer and Patricia Wrede

Glynis’s husband

A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
Fandom for Robots,” A GIFT BUT NOT THE KIND YOU CAN WRAP by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

Chelsea!

Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear
You’re Welcome, Universe, Whitney Gardner
The Inexplicable Logic of My Life, Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Sunbolt and Memories of Ash Intisar Khanani
A Hundred Thousand Worlds by Bob Proehl

Caroline’s mum

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (first of the Mary Russell mysteries), Laurie King
Lost Among the Living, Simone St. James
Crocodile on the Sandbank (first of the Amelia Peabody series), Elizabeth Peters
The Strangler Vine, M.J. Carter
The Shape of Water, Andrea Camilleri
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John le Carré

Erica’s partner’s mother

Fingersmith, Sarah Waters
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson
Vanessa and Her Sister, Priya Parmar

Our transcript for this episode is under the jump!

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Black Tudors Retrieves Forgotten History

One of the beloved talking points of people who are currently Nazis is that there was a time in Europe when everyone was white. Mostly, they think this because they are crap people in search of crap beliefs that will support their continued quest to be terrible. In part, though, historians and teachers have contributed to this belief by beginning the stories of black Britain with the advent of slavery. But as Miranda Kaufmann’s new book Black Tudors shows, the reality is that people of African descent did live in early modern Britain, plying their trades alongside white residents. (For…

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