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…
8 CommentsReading the End Posts
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…
5 CommentsUpdate 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…
8 CommentsLast 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…
8 CommentsBetween 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…
5 CommentsWhat time is it? SHOW TIME. It’s Wednesday, and I double-posted but not because I don’t love you; just because it’s really important to me to give Milky Collins his due. This week, we were honored to be joined by the wonderful Renay of Fangirl Happy Hour and Lady Business. We updated her on our progress with her SF Starter Pack, chatted about what we do when we find an author we truly adore, and discussed John Scalzi’s SF classic Old Man’s War.
You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you on the go!
Here are the time signatures, if you want to skip around:
1:45 – What we’re reading
8:47 – SEA OR SPACE
10:24 – What comes next when we fall in love with an author
29:55 – SF starter pack update
35:23 – Old Man’s War, John Scalzi
47:35 – Choose Your Own Adventure
54:58 – What We’re Reading Next Time!
Books and Links
One Piece, Eiichiro Oda
Here’s Renay’s One Piece readalong!
Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, Ari Berman
A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers
Wilkie Collins, Andrew Lycett
and watching Black Sails, the greatest show of our time
Here’s the Rec Center’s primer on Black Sails!
The Kairos Mechanism, Kate Milford (author of The Boneshaker and The Broken Lands)
The Thief, Megan Whalen Turner
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie
October Daye books, Seanan Maguire (the first one is Rosemary and Rue)
The Hunger Games series, Suzanne Collins
Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor
the Company series, Kage Baker (the first one is In the Garden of Iden)
Here’s the Neil Gaiman post about visiting Alabama!
White Tears, Hari Kunzru
Gods without Men, Hari Kunzru
The Inexplicable Logic of My Life, Benjamin Alire Saenz
Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club, Benjamin Alire Saenz
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Saenz
Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters
The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
Fingersmith, Sarah Waters
Affinity, Sarah Waters
Night Watch, Sarah Waters
Binti, Nnedi Okorafor
Binti: Home, Nnedi Okorafor
Larklight, Philip Reeve
Star Crossed, Philip Reeve
Mars Evacuees, Sophia McDougall
Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear
White Is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara
Old Man’s War, John Scalzi
Should you wish to play Whiskey Jenny’s Choose Your Own Adventure game, you can do so here.
Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads, as well as Ashley. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).
Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcript is available under the jump!
Leave a CommentAfter two weeks of anxious waiting for my damn book to arrive and two weeks of enthusiastic readalong participation, the Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation has reached its close. It was a magical and sensational time in which we found that it is hard to write a biography of someone who sensibly avoids putting incriminating information in writing. The main surprise to me in this readalong is how together Wilkie Collins was. I always thought of him sort of the same way I think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, high all the time, unworldly, and perpetually strapped for cash. This…
8 Comments
23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang
Okay, so y’all know how I am on a quest to one day know everything? What I have discovered on this quest is that it is possible to become interested in just about anything. Most things (maybe all things? I have not fully tested the hypothesis) are only boring until you know enough about them to get past the 101-level stuff, and then they quickly become very very interesting indeed. It’s like that thing where you’re never more than one really good story arc away from loving a certain superhero in comics? Seems weird now, but a few short years…
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