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Reading the End Posts

Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King (plus a giveaway)

ETA: 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.…

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The new Hawkeye comics you maybe haven’t yet realized you want to read but you totally should because they are amazing. Wait, hear me out.

I 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…

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New Feature: Stuff to worry about

Rule 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…

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Review: Unnatural Selection, Mara Hvistendahl; or, Trusting nonfiction authors

If you don’t care about Unnatural Selection in particular but you are interested in the question of trust/mistrust of nonfiction authors in general, scroll down to here, which is where I stop talking about Unnatural Selection. Because I just figured out how to hyperlink to places in my own post. What what. Technology. Unnatural Selection is a book about how widespread access to abortion in many developing nations has led to a crisis in sex-selective abortion, where the ratio of boys born to girls born — a necessary constant because nobody wins in a sex-skewed society — shifts well out…

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Revisiting Harry Potter: Origins

I know I know. I should have posted a post last Friday too. I didn’t do it because it was my first week back and there were a lot of things going on including buying a TV table and setting up my TV and DVD player and the Roku Box Captain Hammer gave me for Christmas. And buying a new purse (this one here). And organizing a work book club meeting for Five Quarters of an Orange (about which more later). And anyway I am lawless and I cannot be contained by rules. So. (I am writing this in a…

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An anecdote about an Alexander Pope scheme

Over Thanksgiving break (I know, y’all, I’m the worst at reviewing books promptly), I read this book Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography, by Ian Hamilton, which was all about how various authors — nearly all of them public domain folks, nothing super modern and juicy — managed (or failed to manage) their literary estates. Each chapter was a case study, and they were all interesting, and I deeply regret that I didn’t review it when it was still fresh in my mind and I could tell you many anecdotes from it. I AM SORRY.…

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The Fates Will Find Their Way, Hannah Pittard; plus a question about collective narrators

READ THIS EVERYONE. READ THIS BOOK. Because I want to know if you would like it as much as I did. I really liked it an awful lot. I like it more and more the more I think about it, though I was not blown away as I was reading it. Sometimes when I’m writing a review, I’ll find that I’m talking myself out of whatever book I’m writing about. As I enumerate the book’s flaws, I’ll realize that they were pretty damning, after all, and that although I enjoyed aspects of the book, I won’t ever want to return…

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Review: Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein

My family is fond of proposing slightly morbid hypotheticals over dinner. Well, Mumsy and Indie and Social Sisters and Captain Hammer and I are fond of this, and Legal Sister is sometimes fond of it and sometimes acts like she thinks we’re nuts and needs to be talked into participating. Daddy usually gazes at us like we are crazy. We like to discuss which sister would get chosen in a Sophie’s Choice situation (it would definitely be Legal Sister, because Social and Indie Sisters are frail flowers, and I am just not that brave). Or who we would pick to…

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Dystopian worlds; and a review of The Uninvited, Liz Jensen

I’ve read a few reviews of Revolution that have said it would be a more interesting show if (well, if several things, but the relevant one here is if) instead of starting fifteen years on from the blackout, it had a chronological plotline starting from the blackout. In fact (said these reviews), very few dystopian world pieces of media really show you how they got there. They’ll talk about how they got there, in greater or lesser degrees of detail, but that won’t be the plot of the story/show/movie/book. There isn’t anything wrong with doing it this way, to be…

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Eeeeeeek, this is what happens

when you are occupied with this new game called Kerfluffle where you go “Kerfluffle!” and your puppy-niece waves her teensy little paws at you in response and that’s it, that’s the whole game. And when you are occupied with this highly adorable game, you do not always have time to read the blogs promptly so sometimes you miss posts that notify you that you are supposed to post an introductory post to the Harry Potter Readalong. And then it is nine in the evening and you are scrambling to get a post written fast fast fast even though what you…

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