Oh, third book. I wish I had made time to write about you last week, for truly you are the sparkliest of all the Harry Potter books. Your beauty makes me want to sing songs of praise. But I do not do that, because I have roommates and they already think I’m weird. I will get to Sirius Black in a minute, but first I would like to speak in praise of some other aspects of the third book. (Obviously, this will be all spoilers all the time.) One, I don’t know why everyone makes such a big deal about…
75 CommentsReading the End Posts
In this installment of Stuff to Worry About, we are going to worry about jellyfish. I recently read (and aggressively loved) the Best American Science and Nature Writing book that Mary Roach edited, and one of the essays was about jellyfish. Did you know you needed to be worried about jellyfish? You need to be worried about jellyfish. They can survive anything. They proliferate in water with insanely high acidity levels. They are the cockroaches of the sea, basically, except unlike cockroaches, they also sting you. Places that never used to have jellyfish now have jellyfish. There are trillions of…
30 CommentsTo be clear — because I got confused about this — this is not Best American Science Writing 2011, which is a whole other thing. It also does not feature the best of American science and nature writing published in 2011. The book is from 2011, the writing is all from 2010. I think that could be made clearer, but whatever, I am not the boss of this series. I got this because, please don’t judge me, I did a search on OverDrive for “science” and this is one of the things that came up. I just felt like some…
26 CommentsNot to blow my own horn, but I totally nailed the first work book club meeting of the New Year. Work book club has been on a hiatus, and we decided in December to reconvene it, so I felt some pressure to make reconvened work book club awesome for everyone. I tried to go with a book everybody would both enjoy and have things to say about, and this book by Joanne Harris felt like a good choice. I know that she’s an enjoyable writer, because I liked Gentlemen and Players, and I also know that she can leave things…
12 CommentsHere is a story about me and Guy Gavriel Kay. When I first went to college, I met this girl on my hall who liked to read fantasy novels and I was like, Awesome! This is my First College Friend! She lent me The Summer Tree because she said Guy Gavriel Kay was amazing. I tried to read it and ferociously hated it, and then I tried twice more and kept on loathing it every time, so I leaned it up against her door and scampered away, and after that I slightly hid from her whenever I saw her because…
34 CommentsPardon my French. But really, The Flame and the Flower, fuck you. I was reading snippets of Social Sister’s copy of Beyond Heaving Bosoms, which she got for Christmas, and it mentioned that the romance novel genre was kicked off by this one book, The Flame and the Flower. And I am interested in the ways genres develop, and I read and enjoyed Forever Amber a few years ago, so I decided to read The Flame and the Flower. I told this to Mumsy and she said I wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t believe her. I also had this…
39 CommentsETA: If you are coming here from Ana’s link round-up, this is still happening! If you’re interested in a copy of Green Grass Running Water, leave a comment and I will pick names on the morning of 11 February. So Ana and Iris are hosting a Long-Awaited Reads Month in January! I intended to read something much more ambitious for it, but honestly, I have been awaiting Green Grass, Running Water longer than almost anything on my TBR list. Part of me had given up hope that I’d ever be able to read it because the library never has it.…
19 CommentsI know! You don’t want to read the new Hawkeye comics because comics are expensive, Hawkeye is boring, and Marvel comics are too mythology-heavy for a newcomer to leap into. But you’re so wrong. Unbeknownst to you, you really do want to read the new Hawkeye comics. Let me explain real quick why your objections to doing so are inadequate. 1. Single-issue comics are an expensive habit. So borrow a friend’s. Or if you can’t borrow a friend’s, just pay the three bucks a month. If you take a year’s subscription through Marvel, it’s still about the same cost as…
43 CommentsRule 34 of Jenny is that if it exists, I will worry about it. So I’m starting this new feature on the blog to spotlight things I suddenly learn I need to worry about. Because if I have to worry about it, I’m damn well not going to be the only one. In this post we are going to worry about how eating quinoa is harming people in South America. Because apparently when we eat quinoa and other things including, goddammit, asparagus which I love, the prices of these things goes way way up in their countries of origin. People…
39 Comments