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Reading the End Posts

People with Jobs: A Romance Round-Up

What what? What’s that you say? I READ SOME BOOKS? Yes, wow, we are all correctly very impressed by this news. I read some books! In this economy! As two hurricanes barrel down on me at one and the same time! Wow! (I also read Not the Girl You Marry and definitely want to read more by Andie Christopher, but I did not immediately write down my thoughts on it and now I remember nothing about it.) Bringing Down the Duke, Evie Dunmore Annabelle Archer can stay at Oxford under a few, conflicting conditions. To be permitted to study outside…

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Harrow the Ninth, Glossed

This is a clearinghouse for all glossing of book references, memes, etc., for Harrow the Ninth. Please comment to add things — I know I missed stuff. And I am very sorry that this exists. I was home sick one day and it was one of those days where I was casting my mind about for something to do that would feel productive but be moderately insane, and this is what I plumped on. There are going to be oblique and explicit spoilers in this post, so do not read it if you mind being spoiled! Also, please hop into…

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Review: Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

NoemĂ­ 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…

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PODCAST – Bonus Episode – Fixing the Hugo Awards

Or: Inside baseball, the podcast! Today, I welcome Adrian of the Spectology podcast to talk about this year’s Hugo Awards, which were, in technical terms, a shitshow. Before we begin, here’s a link full of links about what happened at the ceremony, in case you are curious. You can also check out the full list of this year’s winners, who were terrific. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you on the go! Bonus Episode Here’s a list of everything we talked about! Robert Silverberg and his whole deal…

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Something’s Gotta Give: A Links Round-Up

For some reason, it feels like all of my links are along the theme “untenable situation is untenable.” I am not sure why, except I guess we are all feeling exceptionally untenable about life these days. I read a New York Times article (link) about how we’ve all hit a wall, quarantine-wise, which seems accurate to my own experience and that of my friends-and-relations. If you’ve got anything that’s making you happy in quarantine, hit me up and let me know what that thing is! (My happy things are Indian food and Harrow the Ninth.) Anyway, on to the links!…

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PODCAST – Episode 134 – A Harrow the Ninth Roundtable

Way back in February, so long ago that dinosaurs still walked among us and we had to use spider skillets to make baked goods at the flames of an open hearth, the absolute angels at Tor sent me an ARC of Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth. It would be hard for me to convey the pure, all-consuming joy that I felt while read Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth — hard both because language fails when one attempts to express transcendence, and also because in these quarantimes one struggles to understand happiness. Still, though, if you cast your mind back through the…

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Review: Deal with the Devil, Kit Rocha

We 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…

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Review: The Angel of the Crows, Katherine Addison

tl;dr I liked a lot of things about The Angel of the Crows but a few other things, most notably how the book talks about asexuality, caused me to inhale sharply through my teeth and pinch the bridge of my nose for ten hours in a row So the matter as it stands is that I have never enjoyed a piece of Sherlock Holmes media, with the exception of Elementary, which I watched for two seasons. I would have watched a lot more of it if Natalie Dormer had been the co-lead with Lucy Liu. As a gesture of intellectual…

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PODCAST – Episode 133 – What We Missed and Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks

GUESS WHO’S BACK. I mean, you can guess. It’s Whiskey Jennyyyyyyyy and we are exceedingly excited to be podcasting together again. And that’s without even talking about The Three Musketeers! We’re chatting about the media we missed in 2019 and the media we caught up on in 2019, plus Quan Barry’s novel of witchcraft and field hockey, We Ride Upon Sticks. Rarely have we disagreed so completely about a book! You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you on the go! Episode 133 Here are the time signatures if…

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Max B’s New Speculative Fiction Novel

My informal policy is I don’t read SFF books by white guys, and honestly, when I do contravene my policy, I often regret it. So the fact that I read not one but two SFF books by white dudes, back to back, should tell you something about how much I like these guys’ previous books. There were, however, flaws in my plan. Chief amongst them is the fact that for the goddamn life of me, I could not tell these two books apart. Twitter would mention them. Anticipated books lists would include them. Publicists would email about me. Every time…

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