In some ways, The City of Devi is so perfectly on-trend you’ll roll your eyes. It’s the story of a dystopian future, and of a woman called Sarita who just wants to find her husband. There’s even a love triangle! And a superhero movie for everyone to be obsessed with! But in other ways, The City of Devi is like nothing I’ve read before. Pakistan (or some third party claiming to be as Pakistan) has vowed to drop a nuclear bomb on Mumbai / Bombay (the book’s agnostic as to which name it prefers) on a particular day, and the city is…
17 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
Guys, Quirk Books sent me some paper dolls for review, and this is a good time to tell you how crazy much I love paper dolls. When I was a wee lass, I had paper dolls of Prince Charles and Princess Diana plus paper dolls of the characters from Little Women. They used to go on quests to rescue Prince Charles, of whom, even as a child, I had a very low opinion. These are paper dolls of Hillary Clinton! In the below awesome tableau, the devil has become incarnate and wreaked havoc upon the nation. Luckily, Ghost George Washington…
28 CommentsIt’s our fiftieth episode!! Recurring guest star Ashley joins us to discuss the books that shaped us as readers, review a Nancy Drew and a Hardy Boys mystery, and play a teen sleuths GAME of Whiskey Jenny’s devising. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 50 You can access our holiday gift guide form here. Be sure to get your entries in soon! We’ll be recording in early December with some gift ideas for you Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast,…
Leave a CommentThis week for Nonfiction November, we’re talking about nonfiction that comes in different and exciting forms, not just your standard academic monograph or zippy book from Norton about Satanists or whatever. Pop by Rebecca’s blog to see what everyone else has to say about this! Nontraditional Nonfiction: This week we will be focusing on the nontraditional side of reading nonfiction. Nonfiction comes in many forms. There are the traditional hardcover or paperback print books, of course, but then you also have e-books, audiobooks, illustrated and graphic nonfiction, oversized folios, miniatures, internet publishing, and enhanced books complete with artifacts. So many…
13 CommentsEvery November, four wonderful bloggers (Kim and Leslie and Katie and Rebecca) team up to bring us the marvelous Nonfiction November. The theme of this week is book pairings, in which we pair our fiction reads with a nonfictional counterpart. Earlier in the year, I had the inestimable privilege of participating in Alice (of Reading Rambo)’s readalong of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s book The Monk. It was…deeply stupid. HOWEVER. As I was scouring my reading spreadsheets for nonfiction books to highlight in this book pairing, I remembered that I read a book earlier this year in which every insane thing done…
23 CommentsSo I read Christian Kracht’s much-praised satirical novel Imperium, and for once, I enjoyed satirical writing for the length of a full book. Typically after a chapter or two, satirical novels become too arch for me to enjoy, but no, Kracht keeps it up pretty good. Me and this book could have been friends, I think, if it hadn’t kept making me sigh. Have you had books like that? Where they’re not so ideologically maddening that you want to write a post denouncing them and all that they stand for, but there’s just a couple of things about them that…
21 CommentsFor the past few years, I’ve been working on making my reading less white. As Aarti keeps pointing out, this doesn’t require any shift in my book-reading habits, but only my book-finding habits. And one thing I have found is that if you follow more authors of color (on whatever social media platforms you wish), you’ll find more authors of color. I discovered Aliette de Bodard because I followed Zen Cho (author of Sorcerer to the Crown); since following Aliette de Bodard, I’ve added several more specfic books by authors of color to my TBR list. Because of signal-boosting. THAT…
25 CommentsThe marvelous Kiese Laymon on Confederate flags and SEC football. On competing for the one single diversity spot in the writers’ room: Aisha Harris writes about the unbearable whiteness of TV writers’ rooms. Nobody could be more excited about the new Star Wars trailer than stars John Boyega and Daisy Ridley. Recovering the history of years in slavery, and the story of a forgotten forced deportation: An article that opens with an oddly upsetting anecdote. New details emerge about that Harry Potter play! (It’s not a prequel, it’s a sequel! Joke’s on you, prequel-wanters! You’ll never ever learn more about…
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