Happy Monday, team! Today I’m over at the Oxford Dictionaries blog yammering about genre. Basically it is my considered opinion that literature has genuinely failed us by having so few available filters, and I think the publishing world should do something about it. In 2013, the most recent year for which we have data, the US, UK, and Canada published over half a million books altogether. Yet of this infinitely categorizable bounty, we’ve apparently only managed to sort books into as many genres as your neighborhood Waterstones has clusters of shelves. I call shenanigans! Why should it be so hard…
10 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
Every time I read anything about North Korea, I spend the next two weeks collaring everyone who comes near me and screaming my new North Korea information into their faces. I have still not recovered from the image Barbara Demick left me with in Nothing to Envy of dozens and dozens of North Koreans squatting at the sides of all the roads, waiting and waiting for something that was never going to come. So it was with photographer Wendy Simmons’s My Holiday in North Korea: The Funniest/Worst Place on Earth. The full post here could just be moments in this…
25 CommentsHappy Wednesday, everyone! Thanks so much to everyone who’s asked about flooding in Louisiana and checked in to see if I’m okay. My bit of the state’s totally fine, so it’s just lots of worry and hug-sending to the people in places where water was several feet deep. Anyway! So now it is podcast day! I included a cut at the end of the podcast so y’all can witness THIS phenomenon, which is very real: I like pretending Whiskey Jenny is insulting me. she falls apart reassuring me of her love. she just shrieked NO YOU ARE THE COOL RABBIT.…
8 CommentsHappy Friday, everyone! How to cull your books: The Awl guide. Let me tell you my method, team. Take all the books. Line them up on the floor, right to left, by how much you love them. Then draw a line somewhere in the middle of that long line of books and cull everything to the left of your line. Boom. Done. More on fan entitlement (and a bit of side-eye for Steven Moffat, which I am never not here for) from The Mary Sue. I’m really digging Maddie Myers’s work on The Mary Sue these days, y’all! Go follow…
11 CommentsHex is the scariest book I’ve ever read. Hex was so scary that when I was reading it in bed, I got too frightened to continue and also had to walk around the upstairs of my apartment checking the closets for bad guys/ghosts/monsters. Hex was so scary that I thereafter stopped reading it before bed and only read it during my commute. The basic premise seemed fine. There’s this town called Black Spring where once upon a time a woman called Katherine was forced to murder her own son, then hanged as a witch. Her ghost has haunted the town…
34 CommentsHappy Friday, everyone! Today I’m linking you to the adventures of me, elsewhere! The lovely Shiny New Books has out a brand new issue, and my lovely pal Memory and I are in it, recommending you all the best YA of the summer and being heartfelt. Viz: I think of the sort of fiction I had access to when I was a teenager, and I look at what’s available to today’s young people, and I’m beyond happy for them. The trans kids get to see themselves on the page and the cis kids get to experience the world through someone…
6 CommentsI know y’all had given us up for dead but the triumphal return of the Reading the End Bookcast has finally arrived! Whiskey Jenny and I return to talk about that whole Harry Potter / magic in America debacle, then to discuss authors who can’t leave their fictional worlds behind. We review (finally) Simon van Booy’s Father’s Day, and we answer a burning question from listener Ashley. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go! Episode 63 Note: We experienced so many technical difficulties in…
1 CommentY’all. This tag. The Disney Song Book Tag was created by Aria’s Books, and I picked it up from Rachel at Life of a Female Bibliophile. 1. “A Whole New World” – Pick a book that made you see the world differently. This may not count, because I barely saw the world at all prior to reading these books. However, I’m still choosing the Chronicles of Narnia. My mother read these books to me and my sister starting when I was three, so there’s not much in my life that didn’t get put through the Chronicles of Narnia goggles. I…
22 Comments