In my post last year about reading diversely, I forgot to mention another side effect of more diverse reading: gaining new areas of interest. Sri Lanka came onto my radar when I read the beautiful-covered On Sal Mal Lane last year, but it also left me uncertain about the particulars of the country’s civil wars. The difficulty is that when there are no hooks in your brain for new information to grab onto, you’re less willing to take in that information in the first place; and once you have taken it in, you’re less likely to retain it. (This is…
9 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
I received an electronic copy of this book from the publisher, for review consideration. The venerable Jack Zipes, one of the shiniest scholars in fairy tale studies, has brought us a lovely treat, which is a new translation of the first edition of the Grimm Fairy Tales, decorated with wonderfully creepy illustrations by Andrea Dezsö. This edition includes stories that were later excised for reasons of provenance (Bluebeard was too French to keep in subsequent editions), incompleteness, repetitiveness, or family-unfriendly values. The Grimms make the following case for the inclusion of the sex-and-devils stories: Objections have been raised . .…
21 CommentsDid you miss us? Our podcast hiatus went longer than we intended, due to some technical difficulties on Whiskey Jenny’s end. But at last we have struggled through those problems to bring you a new episode! In this one we talk about serial writing and why it’s so great; we review John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van; and we play a game about games, invented by Randon! You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 32 Or if you wish, you can find us…
Leave a CommentFor 2014, I set myself a goal of reading one book by a person of color out of every five books I read altogether. That number was on the low side because I’d never done this sort of experiment before, and I didn’t want to set myself up for failure. As many people (Amanda of Book Riot, recently) have noted, the book world is remarkably white, and it’s a cycle that reinforces itself. If — like many bloggers these days! — you embark on a project that necessitates your seeking out books by nonwhite authors, it can be tricky to…
45 CommentsHello my scrumptious delights! Did you miss my links round-up last time, when I did not do one? I did! But here I am again with a new one. Edan Lepucki thinks about whether character likeability is beside the point, at The Millions. And I kept thinking about how nobody liked Harriet Vane when Strong Poison came out. I know about this from Dorothy Sayers’s letters. Readers wrote to her in droves begging her not to marry Peter to that dreadful woman. BACK OFF, people of the 1930s. Harriet Vane is one of my favorite characters in all of literature.…
12 CommentsI love publisher catalogs, y’all. I can’t describe how much I love them. It’s because I judge books by their covers, and publishers’ catalogs offer me the opportunity to do that on a grand scale. So here are a few of the books from 2015 for which I am excited, in no particular order. Flood of Fire, the last in Amitav Ghosh’s wonderful Ibis trilogy, appears in August, and then I can at last set about getting matching copies of all three. Sea of Poppies was one of my favorite books of its year, and while River of Smoke was…
31 CommentsHow Freedom and Necessity was described to me by Anastasia: An epistolary novel set in Victorian times, with magic! What I pictured: Sorcery and Cecelia The primary topic of the first forty pages of Freedom and Necessity: Hegel, I swear to God. You know, the philosopher. And his concepts of idealism. So, yeah. Me and Freedom and Necessity got off to a bumpy start. Luckily, I was on the bus and had nothing else of interest for my eyes to rest on for the duration of the bus ride, which meant that perforce I read past the first 40 pages…
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