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Reading the End Posts

PODCAST, Ep. 116 – Our Oldest and Newest Books, and Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread

Springtime pollen is sapping both our brains, but fortunately this podcast was never very serious to start with, and we’re hoping you won’t notice. We do “hoping you won’t notice a thing” by loudly and repeatedly talking about the thing. Our transparency is part of our charm, we dearly hope. This podcast, we’re chatting about some of the oldest and newest books we possess, and then Whiskey Jenny breaks her Helen Oyeyemi tie by falling in total love with Gingerbread. (Yay!) You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you…

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Review: Finder, Suzanne Palmer

In the year of our Lord 2017 (of unfond memory), I read these two stories about sweet little bots doing their best, and it launched me into a new state of being in which I read short fiction so much that I have had to commission a logo about it. The main one, admittedly, was “Fandom for Robots,” but a very close second was Suzanne Palmer’s very sweet “The Secret Life of Bots.” So it was with great pleasure that I learned she has her debut novel out this year: Finder! Fergus Ferguson is a finder, and he’s been tasked…

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PODCAST, Ep. 115 – Changing Our Minds and Nicholas Johnson’s Big Dead Place

Mmm, this Wednesday y’all all get to experience one of my favorite things about Whiskey Jenny, which is how susceptible she is to advertising. When we see a commercial for Oreos she goes “wow I could really go for an Oreo” and when we read a book about living in a prank-filled super-broed-out polar prison, she goes “maybe I should get a job in Antarctica.” It’s very admirable because she is open to new experiences, but oh my God, don’t get a job in Antarctica. IT SOUNDS AWFUL. This week we’re chatting about books and genres we’ve changed our minds…

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Authors in Fandom: An Interview with K. Ancrum

Happy Monday! I hope you all had a good, minimally annoying St. Patrick’s Day, but it’s a new week now and time to celebrate the soon-to-come release of The Weight of the Stars, or, as I call it, LESBIANS IN SPACE, by K. Ancrum. To celebrate the occasion, I asked her to stop by ye olde blog and talk about some of her fanfic influences — and wouldn’t you goddamn know it, she wrote her damn thesis on fandoms! What a world. How did you get into fandom? Like so many before me, I was sucked into fandom via Star…

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Henry Higgins Is Gay: A Links Round-Up

Look, before we get into anything else, here is a post about a lawsuit that hinges on whether this one romance author invented the omegaverse. It’s important to know that she did not. This case gives me pure joy. I wish every day could contain an omegaverse lawsuit. This piece on Netflix password-sharing is incredible, but also, it has such a good update at the end. Adam Serwer on the Jussie Smollett mess and the history of hate crime hoaxes. Zak Cheney-Rice on what this case does and doesn’t mean. The knitting community is grappling with racism. Carrie Ann Lucas,…

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Review: Empire of Sand, Tasha Suri

Do y’all have those genres that you always say you don’t like, even though you have a not-insignificant number of books on your shelf in those genres? I always say I don’t like historical fiction or secondary world fantasy, I believe for the same reason in both cases, that being that I’m not good at making pictures in my head so I have a hard time submerging myself in fictional worlds. What I mean, I think, is less that I can’t enjoy historical fiction or secondary world fantasy, and more that I require to be sold a little harder on…

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

It’s Monday and I lost an hour of sleep and it isn’t kicking my ass this year like it did last year but I DO NOT LOVE IT. Hopefully y’all are in less crabby spirits than I am. Stop by Book Date to see what other folks are reading this dark and crabby Monday morning. What I Read Last Week: One of my reading resolutions for this year was to read fifteen of my own damn books, of which ten were to be nonfiction. I am killing it so far! In the past week, I finished reading Joan Aiken’s The…

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Review: Punishment without Crime, Alexandra Natapoff

Reading a good book — nobody will be surprised to hear I think this — is one of the most purest pleasures in this life, and Alexandra Natapoff’s Punishment without Crime is so so so good that I kept having to reschedule things in order to keep reading it. Natapoff is looking at the misdemeanor offenses that make up a massive percentage of the US criminal system. She examines the many ways the misdemeanor system violates the dignity and rights of those caught up in its net, and proposes solutions to ensure that all citizens receive justice. I can’t say…

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Review: The Vela, Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, and SL Huang

OOF. Tear my heart into tiny pieces, why don’t you, The Vela writing team? If you haven’t yet heard about Serial Box, my friends, you are missing a trick. They do serialized fiction — mostly SFF — with some of the most incredible writers working today. The Vela (out tomorrow!) brings together some of my truest new faves from the past few years: Yoon Ha Lee, who wrote Ninefox Gambit; Becky Chambers, who wrote The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; Rivers Solomon, who wrote An Unkindness of Ghosts; and SL Huang, who wrote Zero Sum Game. Of course,…

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