It’s Friday! And not to tip my hand, but I have a favorite from among my links today, and I’m putting my favorite link first, and hopefully you too will enjoy it as I did. It’s about those mystery seeds. Remember those mystery seeds? From last year? A bunch of people started getting mysterious seeds in the mail, from China, and then it was like, aaaa, where are these seeds even coming from? Why is China sending people seeds? WHAT GIVES? The answer may surprise you. Have some links. The China seeds mystery, solved. (link) IDK maybe we shouldn’t have…
Leave a CommentAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
Friends, a sea change has befallen Whiskey Jenny in this plague year. Not to spoil the thing I find out on air this episode, but Whiskey Jenny has made a shift! a change! from being a determined non-DNFer to DNFing books left and right. In but the last few days prior to recording this episode, she DNFed two entire books! I didn’t even know this when I proposed this topic, but needles to say I’m thrilled about it. I think everyone should abandon books they’re not enjoying. You’d all find it so cleansing! We chat about that, get a polar…
Leave a CommentI watched Loki. On one hand, I enjoyed it. On the other hand, if I were the casting department at Disney/Marvel, I would spend all my days aflame with resentment that I went to all this trouble of casting the perfect people and ensuring they all have excellent chemistry together, only to have the company chuck the whole thing out the window by trying to use six episodes to tell a full television season’s worth of stories. My frustration with Loki is partly a bigger frustration with the trends in TV. Around the time of your Mad Mens and your…
Leave a CommentOMG I am highly blessed and favored, y’all. Literally as I was writing this post, I was complaining internally about the fact that it’s the middle of July and still no second-half-of-2021 book preview from The Millions. I was like, “Forget ‘I love television,’ I’m going to use the subject of this post to bitch about the fact that the lengthy and clearly labor-intensive book preview has not dropped,” and as I was thinking about a pithy way to bitch about that, I opened The Millions to double-check and you will never guess what happened! YES THAT IS RIGHT IT…
Leave a CommentIt’s Wednesday once again, and we are all the way into summer now! I had the opportunity to speak with P. Djèlí Clark, author of the new novel A Master of Djinn, a murder mystery set in an alternate version of Cairo with magic! And djinns! We chatted about what real historians have to say about alternate history, changes in the SF genre over the past ten years, and when to stop researching for a historical novel (answer: never). It’s a great conversation about a terrific book, and I hope you enjoy! You can listen to the podcast in the…
Leave a CommentAs we ease into July, I wish everyone zero hurricanes and an adequate heat infrastructure. Because it’s been so consistently rainy here, we haven’t been getting the unbearably hot summer temperatures (though I’m sure they’re coming), but the downside to that is that the ground is going to be completely saturated so if there is a hurricane shit’s definitely going to flood. Ah, the climate crisis! So present! So little political will to protect people against the consequences wrought by a handful of rich assholes and their rich asshole companies! Is it any wonder that I retreat miserably into books…
1 CommentThere’s this moment in Flamefall, the second book in Rosaria Munda’s Aurelian trilogy, where the protagonist asks one of the leaders of a scrappy band of rebel freedom fighters what they’re fighting for. She’s like “Equality!” and he’s like, “Neat, cool, great, but like what are your policy proposals?” How many dystopian YA novels have you read where the scrappy rebels our protagonist is allied with just have the basic policy “we won’t throw you in a fiery hellpit filled with ravenous snakes like these current bastards”? Like, that is a great start and I’m all for toppling your dystopian…
Leave a CommentAnyone who didn’t read A Song Below Water last year missed a trick, and I would also like to report that I, while reading it, missed a trick. The heroine of A Song Below Water is a siren, though she dedicates a lot of energy to hiding this fact about herself. While the world is friendly to some types of magic–particularly the charming and melodical eloko, of which Tavia’s school’s resident mean girl Naema is one–they’re acutely hostile to sirens. It is no coincidence that only Black girls and women can be sirens. A Chorus Rises is a companion novel…
Leave a CommentI don’t have any links about 2021 being halfway over, but I just felt like this post should acknowledge it. Like: What the fuck? How? It was March yesterday! But also, the coup attempt was eleventyfinity years ago, so I guess we have confirmed via science that time has not yet resumed being normal. The first of the links in this links round-up pleased me mightily, and then there are some that are a bit sad, and then we close out with some articles about cults, and yes, I do include the world of the Bachelor franchise in that. (Just kidding.)…
Leave a CommentIt’s Wednesday once again! And Whiskey Jenny and I have realized that we never talked about moms in fiction, and we’re mad about moms in fiction, so HERE YA GO. Other content in this podcast includes: Whiskey Jenny talking about Ted Lasso, possibly her favorite thing ever; me abjectly apologizing for Hatening Whiskey Jenny way too intensely with Christopher Yates’s dark academia novel, Black Chalk; kind of a lot of bloopers; and a lot of discussion of unreliable narrators and how much the Whiskey Family dislikes them. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download…
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