After a fallow period of YA reading, I’ve been absolutely tearing through new YA books this October. Hot take, YA is really good right now! Sometimes when I think about my own youth and the, like, three bookshelves worth of YA books my library had back then, and half of them were Lurlene McDaniel, and that was a good library system, I just feel very very happy that the youth of today have such an amazing profusion of great books. At least something is going right for the youths! The rest of the world is chaos and disaster but they…
Leave a CommentAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
Look I know I KNOW we are all tired of the kidney / group chat / bad art friend discourse, it was fun when it dropped and now it’s the end of the week and we’re tired, I KNOW. It’s just that I need to talk about it with my mother at Sunday coffee, and for that to happen I need her to read the article, and for her to read the article I have to be like MOM READ THIS HERE on my blog or else one of us is going to forget that we ever wanted her to…
Leave a CommentNote: I write this review while listening to Béla Bartók’s “Sonata for Solo Violin.” No disrespect to the other orchestra sections but strings are the best ones. Light from Uncommon Stars has three protagonists: a teenage violinist, a grown adult violinist who can buy her soul back from Hell by giving it seven souls of younger violinists (her students), and a donut shop proprietor who is actually an alien on the run from galactic warfare. As that description indicates, this is a book that unapologetically blends genres, a fantasy novel that’s a sci-fi novel that’s actually really a novel about…
Leave a CommentThis year has been shit. This month has been shit. This week has been really shit. But there is a single ray of light, and it is Lil Nas X’s new album, Montero, which is getting me through. Craig Jenkins reviews the album for Vulture. (link) I am excited to see songs from Montero turn up in the repertoire of college marching bands. What does appropriation mean in food culture? (link) NPR crowd-sourced a list of the best SFF from the last ten years, and it’s a good-ass list. (link) The Jeopardy! situation was some real fuckin bullshit and I…
1 CommentHello, patron friends! This podcast is coming to you earlier than expected because there is a very enormous hurricane coming my way, and I have had to hustle to get this podcast out in advance of its arrival. If you are not in the path of a hurricane currently, please keep a good thought for us! If you are experiencing some other natural disaster, please know that I am keeping a good thought for you. What a dreadful world it is these days! Why are we all stuck with it this way? You can listen to the podcast in the…
1 CommentMy Friday the 13ths tend to be good, but I’m getting the results of a COVID test today, which feels very very cursed. Pray for me; I really want to do sister night with my sister tonight, and I very much want to spend some bonding time with my nephew this weekend. I miss him! He is such a good boy! Anyway, let’s have a links round-up! I’m going to start with an article that is partly rather grim about the future of the pandemic, but also reassures us that the pandemic will end someday. This is helpful to me.…
Leave a Commenttldr: Wow. When Nghi Vo released her first novella, Empress of Salt and Fortune, I was blown away by her talent at the task category “putting a book together.” I know that’s a very unsexy way to describe a novella, but it applies! Empress packed so much plot, emotional insight, and character development into its 128 pages that it felt like an apotheosis of the novella form. (My use here of apotheosis will be but the first of many hyperbolic shrieks throughout this review, because I’m about as bullish on Nghi Vo’s writing as I have been about any author…
1 CommentHappy August, everybody! Somehow it’s August of 2021, which is a fact I don’t want to dwell on too much because HOW, but the good news is that it means we’ve circled back once more to Women in Translation Month! While books in translation still don’t comprise a huge chunk of my reading, I fully credit WIT Month and, more broadly, its inventor Meytal of Bibliobio, for making translated books feel less scary to me. I used to require a lot of persuasion before I’d try a translated book, and now I’m actively allured by them, especially when the authors…
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