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Reading the End Posts

Review: When Dimple Met Rishi, Sandhya Menon

WHAT A DELIGHT. If you’re one of those people who laments the decline of the rom-com as a movie genre, and you remotely enjoy YA, I must insist that you read When Dimple Met Rishi. I yearn and yearn for it to be made into a teen movie. Whatever happened to teen movies? Where are the Can’t Hardly Waits of the new generation? So the deal is that Dimple, a budding coder, gets permission from her parents to attend Insomnia Con, at which the winning app design will receive support and backing from legendary computer person Jenny Lindt. BUT THERE’S…

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At Last, the Recess: A Links Round-Up

Well this has been a hell of a Congressional season, and one of my damn senators still hasn’t held a damn town hall. But at least we’re getting a short break. Roxane Gay on Confederate and why she doesn’t want it. I’m going to share this one quote because it’s really good: It is curious that time and again, when people create alternate histories, they are largely replicating a history we already know, and intimately. They are replicating histories where whiteness thrives and people of color remain oppressed. I’ll never not want to post links about Tom Stoppard and how…

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Review: The Bedlam Stacks, Natasha Pulley

Note: I received a copy of The Bedlam Stacks from the publisher for review consideration. This has not influenced the content of my review. So a funny thing about Natasha Pulley is that I resisted reading The Watchmaker of Filigree Street for ages, as the cover and premise sounded much more whimsical than I thought I’d be into. But actually, the word I’d use for both that book and her sophomore novel, The Bedlam Stacks, is melancholy. They are really not whimsical at all, so if — like me — you have been avoiding them for that reason, do not…

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Everything I Learned from the Best American Science and Nature Writing This Year

Ha, ha, just kidding. How could I possibly enumerate every single thing that I learned from this year’s edition of the Best American Science and Nature Writing? Impossible! I have already forgotten most of it! My brain is a leaky sieve and I am lucky even to remember my blog password in order to log in and write this post! I read this as part of the #24in48 Readathon, which was great except that right as I got to the end and I was all like “nailed it, book finished, no more science to be learned here,” and then they…

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Speculative Tales from the Caribbean

Happy Wednesday! We had to push the podcast back due to me not getting it edited in time, so I instead bring you the glad tidings of Akashic Books, by way of Karen Lord’s collection New Worlds Old Ways. Have you heard about Akashic Books? They are great. They are an independent publishing company that seeks out and publishes work by “authors who are either ignored by the mainstream, or who have no interest in working within the ever-consolidating ranks of the major corporate publishers.” As you might suspect based on that description, they are based in Brooklyn. Anyway, one…

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Review: Beyond Trans, Heath Fogg Davis

So it used to be that I cared what words people used to describe their gender. Not a lot, but some. Enough to roll my eyes about this or that gender description that I suspected the youths had gotten from spending too much time on Tumblr. At some point, though, I stopped caring, and I have to tell you that it is a much, much better way of life. Society wants you to care a lot about gender, and my path as I have gotten older and older is to care about gender closer and closer to zero. Are women…

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#24in48 Readathon

Update 7/23/17 Okay, look. I have not been posting a ton of blog updates in this readathon because I’ve been yammering on Twitter BUT: I made a book spine poem, and I am so proud of it that I need to share it with you. Look at this business. Here is a transcript of my faboo poem. It is called “music of the ghosts.” You can tell that’s the title because I have helpfully set it off with the opposite side of the book spine. I have done the same for the stanzas. music of the ghosts the dearly departed…

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Rewatching the Wrinkle in Time Trailer: A Links Round-Up

Last weekend was so, so much if you are a nerdy girl. First there was this magical Wrinkle in Time teaser trailer, which made me want to buy Storm Reid a thousand bouquets of flowers forever. Then there was some Star Wars footage with Oscar Isaac giving Carrie Fisher a kiss, plus these excellent red posters for The Last Jedi (BUT NO POSTER OF ROSE AND I AM FURIOUS ABOUT IT). And THEN as if that weren’t enough, the Thirteenth Doctor was announced to be A WOMAN and I just, wow, it just was really, really a lot. How to…

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Review: Take Us to Your Chief, Drew Hayden Taylor

Between Neil Gaiman and Nalo Hopkinson and now Drew Hayden Taylor, I may need to reconsider my stated position that I am not a fan of short story collections. The emended version of this position — triggered by my reading of Drew Hayden Taylor’s collection Take Us to Your Chief — is that I am not a fan of short story collections unless they are SFF. Take Us to Your Chief is a wonderfully charming, clever, melancholy collection of what Taylor describes as Native sci-fi. The author is an Ojibway from the Curve Lake First Nations, and indigenous traditions and…

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Review: Thorn, Intisar Khanani

“I don’t know what justice is,” I tell him. “But I am trying to get what I can right.” The above paragraph is a perfect summation of why I loved Thorn, and of why I love Intisar Khanani so much as an author. In Thorn, as in all her books, she writes about characters who may be in bad situations but who are trying their best. Characters who are trying their best are balm to my frazzled soul in these difficult times, so I am pushing Intisar Khanani’s books on people like they are ebags dot com packing cubes. Consider…

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