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…
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As 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 Commenttl;dr: TEN THOUSAND STARS Are you salty as fuck about how Game of Thrones ended? Have you spent time surfing the “Pegging” tag on AO3? (sorry Mom that I am talking about pegging on the internet again) Do you yearn for more fat romance heroines? Cease your peregrinations, your search is at an end! Olivia Dade is here for her you with her latest novel Spoiler Alert, which is all about a fat fanfiction-writing geologist who goes on a date with the star of the biggest fantasy show of our time (who secretly also writes fanfiction). It’s not Game of…
Leave a CommentAs I may have mentioned twenty-two thousand times, I gave up magical thinking in 2019, and this was very smart of me because 2020 turned out to be a magical thinking minefield. Luckily I have a — actually, I have lost control of this metaphor and do not know what sort of a thing you’d use to protect against a minefield. I’m coming up all mine-sniffing animals, and I don’t want my very successful self-administered cognitive behavioral therapy to feel in any way connected with exploding rats or whatever. What I’m saying is, I am safe from the minefield of…
Leave a CommentMy pandemic reading seems to come and go in waves — one month I’ll be tearing through books like there’s no tomorrow, and then another month I am just staring at the page blankly trying to make myself engage with what’s on it. August was a good reading month, and I can already tell September’s not going to be. I’ve got like sixteen YA books checked out that I’m officially excited to read, but I can’t get started on any of them, or any other book either. Is anyone else having this problem? Luckily, I read two terrific contemporary YA…
Leave a CommentA friend recently mentioned that quarantine lets you discover what everyone’s fail state is, which I thought was incredibly smart. Mine is definitely Control Freak, often manifest in the subcategory Resource Hoarding. One way in which this has manifested during quarantine is that I’ve spent all my travel money on books. Ordinarily I am quite frugal about buying things, but this year I have acquired an undue number of books — though admittedly that’s partly because I’m trying to support independent bookstores. So it was a thrill that Whiskey Jenny agreed to devote this podcast to the books we’ve acquired…
Leave a CommentNoemà Taboada likes being escorted to glamorous parties by handsome men, and she has every anticipation that she can go on doing so — until her father orders her to go into the Mexican countryside to check on her cousin Catalina. Since Catalina’s marriage to Virgil Doyle — an Englishman and scion to a family that once owned a silver mine but has fallen on hard times — they have heard very little from her, until they receive a letter in which she begs them to come save her. There are ghosts in the walls, she says. They are speaking…
Leave a CommentWe each spend these quarantimes dowsing for happiness, waving our rods hither and yon in the ever-more-vain hope that happiness will appear just beneath the surface. There is a happiness drought, and we are denounced as frauds for believing we can find it. But there is hope! Kit Rocha’s Deal with the Devil is here, and it has all the happiness (and waving rods1) you could desire! In the aftermath of enormous solar flares and governmental collapse, Nina and her team of mercenary librarians have carved out a home for themselves. They share knowledge and stories with their community and…
Leave a CommentSo A Black Women’s History of the United States is the latest in a series from Beacon Press that I absolutely love. The first one I read was An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, which btw is also stupendous and y’all should all buy it. Since then I have acquired several other books in the series, so the queer one and the disability one are ON MY SHELVES WAITING FOR ME. Having read two of these books, I would like to report that they are both amazingly concise, readable, and filled with information. I would…
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