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Reading the End Posts

Episode 138 – Fictional Travel Destinations and Elizabeth Little’s Pretty as a Picture

Happy Wednesday, darling friends! We have dedicated much of today’s podcast to indulging in escapist fantasies, and I have to be honest: They made us feel really nice. We highly recommend taking a short break in which you pretend you do not live in our present dystopian hellscape, as it is beneficial to one’s mental health. On today’s podcast, we also talk about our non-escapist democracy preservation efforts, as well as reviewing Elizabeth Little’s totally delightful mystery novel, Pretty as a Picture. Join us! You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to…

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Review: Spoiler Alert, Olivia Dade

tl;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…

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Multiple Calebs: A Links Round-Up

Hullo, it is once again a Friday that somehow feels like a Monday, in advance of another Monday that I’m confident will feel deceptively like a Monday! On the weekend I plan to read as much as possible, write many lovely notes, do laundry, clean the loo, and edit very much podcast. If I run out of tasks I shall write letters to support democracy, because of course democracy is hanging on by a thread. Would you like to support democracy too? You can head over to Mobilize or Resistance Labs or Postcards to Voters or Vote Forward to check…

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PODCAST – Episode 137 – Fall Book Preview and Alisha Rai’s Girl Gone Viral

It is Part Two of our inadvertent two-part series on romance novels centered on viral moments (the first part being Talia Hibbert’s Take a Hint, Dani Brown). Today we’re talking about the angst-forward member of this pair, Alisha Rai’s Girl Gone Viral, and learning about the relative angst tolerance of each of us two Jennys. We also chat about the books we’re excited for in Fall 2020, as well as the things we’re reading and something-elsing (watching and listening to, respectively), and try not to get too silly even though we recorded on a video chat this time. You can…

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i.e., Interrupting: A Links Round-Up

Listen, I will never recover from the first link in this links round-up, and that is just because I think it’s quite rude that someone walked into my family home and took numerous secret recordings of how we talk and how other people feel about how we talk. YES it took several years before my brother-in-law was able to figure out how to participate in our conversations because he was too polite to interrupt us and therefore he never got to say anything at all. YES I show engagement by peppering people with questions. Please let me have my privacy…

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Review: Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

As 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…

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PODCAST – Episode 136 – An Interview with Andrea Stewart, Author of The Bone Shard Daughter

It’s a beautiful day for an author interview! I was fortunate enough to have the chance to speak with Andrea Stewart, whose debut novel, The Bone Shard Daughter, came out yesterday. It’s a fantasy novel set in an Asian-inspired world where the Emperor rules over the islands with… honestly a fair bit of inattention. He’s much more interested in creating magical constructs, which are powered by tiny shards of bone, taken from the skull of every child in the Empire when they turn eight years old. His daughter Lin is competing frantically to get back her memory from when she…

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Kids Trying Their Best in Contemporary YA

My 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…

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Untitled Links Round-Up Game

Are there infinite ways to say THIS HAS BEEN A WEEK? Because that’s what I need. In Louisiana alone, the cops killed a Black man named Trayford Pellerin (link); a white guy killed an unarmed Black man in a Trader Joe’s parking lot (link); and a massive (though not as massive as we feared) hurricane struck the southwest coast of the state (link). That is one single state that those things happened in. And yet at the same time things keep happening in many states. Please, please do whatever you can do to ensure that Trump does not get reelected…

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PODCAST – Episode 135 – Books We Bought in the Quarantine and Talia Hibbert’s Take a Hint, Dani Brown

A 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…

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