I read more academic nonfiction than I tell y’all about. If you happen to be in my conversational line of fire as I am reading a thing, you will hear about it (sorry, family! sorry, friends! but not sorry enough to stop!), but the blog usually does not. Except sometimes my utterly favorite feminist scholar has a new collection of essays and I can’t resist asking the publisher for it, and then you get to hear about it after all. You lucky ducks. So, disclosure: I received this book from the publisher for review consideration. One time I read Phyllis…
7 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
This week, we’re doing a round-up of some superlatives from 2014 and reviewing the first book in Elena Ferrante’s famed Neapolitan series (mm, can’t see that name without thinking of ice cream). You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 34 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 Song is by Jeff MacDougall and comes…
9 CommentsI had to read How It Went Down in sections. It’s about a black teenager who is shot by a white man, and all the different characters — the witnesses, the families, friends — tell their perspectives of what happened on the day of Tariq’s death and in the aftermath of it. If any other author in the world had written this book, I wouldn’t have read it. But I trust Kekla Magoon from her wonderful, wrenching The Rock and the River, which is about teenage brothers and their participation (or lack of it) in the Black Panther Party. I read the first third in December, and then the…
30 CommentsThis has been the persistent pattern of how modern society has dealt with old age. The systems we’ve devised were almost always designed to solve some other problem. As one scholar put it, describing the history of nursing homes from the perspective of the elderly “is like describing the opening of the American West from the perspective of the mules; they were certainly there, and epochal events were certainly critical to the mules, but hardly anyone was paying very much attention to them at the time.” The excerpt I read from Being Mortal in the New Yorker dealt with the astonishing rarity…
31 CommentsBeautiful Darkness (Drawn and Quarterly) opens as a girl called Aurora has tea with a boy she has a crush on. (They met at the ball the other night.) Then — in seconds — they find themselves struggling to survive in the woods. They are all very wee, and the woods are normal-sized. They also appear to have emerged from the decomposing corpse of a little girl. Possibly — the book isn’t explicit about this — all of the tiny people are aspects of the dead girl’s personality, now set free to roam freely and tinily around the woods. If that synopsis seems unwarrantedly weird, don’t blame me. Apply…
17 CommentsOkay, these are a bit old by now. Too bad for you! I haven’t done a links round-up in a while and that is why. Kate Elliott discusses female friendships on television at The Book Smugglers, and recommends some forthcoming fantasy books, thus lengthening my TBR list for 2015 even further. Seriously, my 2015 list is out of control. I need help. An article on Pamela Colman Smith, the wonderful artist of the classic Tarot deck. Hers is the only Tarot deck I will condescend to use. Others are beautiful, but Pamela Colman Smith’s has all the symbolism. Rembert Browne…
10 CommentsThe podcast says Happy New Year!! Whiskey Jenny and I are back once again to talk about fictional workplaces (we have a small taxonomy of how to do these) and The Singer’s Gun, a book from Emily St. John Mandel’s backlist. We also play a game with Randon that deals with modes of transportation. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 33 Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating!…
Leave a Comment