This is my master post for readathon, so strap in! I’ve never done one of these things before! Hour 11 I was going to say that it’s hour 11 and I haven’t lost steam, but I seem to have read much less in the past three and a half hours than in the foregoing hours. Am I slowing up? Is my old age catching up with me? I did take a break to do some end-of-month budgeting and fold my laundry. Read: 2 chapters of my genocide book (only 7 chapters now remain!), Paper Girls, vol. 1 Currently reading: Vision,…
12 CommentsReading the End Posts
WHAT A GREAT BOOK. I impulse-ILLed it because — something? Why did I impulse-ILL this book? Was it honestly just because I was tipsy? I have two drinks let’s say once a week, and even so I haven’t impulse-ILLed a book since that one book about internet trolls that was weirdly sympathetic to internet trolls considering how terrible internet trolls are. I believe that what happened was I encountered this book while I was reading up on racebending for this blog post, and I was slightly tipsy and this book looked sooooo gooooooood and anyway it was a GREAT LIFE…
7 CommentsHere’s the summary of White Tears from Goodreads, because I need you to understand my reading experience: Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America’s great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it’s a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to…
23 CommentsWe made it to another Friday, friends! I hope you all have restful and pleasant weekends scheduled, with lots of yummy foods and indulgent television. But before you get to that, I implore you to give yourselves the unparalleled gift of my first link, a piece about Rachel Dolezal that crashed The Stranger‘s website and hopefully introduced many new people to the superb work of Ijeoma Iluo. So far everyone I’ve sent it to has said “Damn, DAMN” to me — not once but several times — while quoting back to me relevant sections of the article. Feel free to…
19 CommentsI am so sorry this podcast is late, y’all. Life got on top of me, and I realized last Sunday that I hadn’t even glanced at the rough files for podcast, let alone begun editing. BUT it is here now, and we get to have the unparalleled delight of hearing Whiskey Jenny’s response to the FIRST FANFIC SHE HAS EVER READ. We also discuss how we find the books we read, and we review Patrick O’Brian’s book Master and Commander. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you…
2 CommentsNote: I received a copy of Njinga of Angola from the publisher for review consideration. This has not affected the contents of my post. My brilliant friend Alice told me that this book existed (thanks, Alice!), and I hied me off to the publisher at once to ask for a review copy. I love African history and I love BALLER QUEENS, so you can see that this was a match made in heaven. Njinga was a seventeenth-century queen in what is now northwestern Angola. At a time when European rule was sweeping across Africa, Njinga successfully ruled the kingdoms of…
13 CommentsThere is nothing quite as cleansing as finally reading a book that’s been on your TBR list for untold ages. Ana of Things Mean a Lot reviewed it in 2012, which is on the outer edge of how long I’ll let a book linger on my TBR spreadsheet. If I’ve let it go for five years without reading it, I have to accept that I didn’t truly want to read it in the first place.1 Alice from Of Books reminded me more recently why I wanted to read it, so thanks to both of you, lovely blogging friends! As Ana…
16 CommentsHuge thanks to Sarah of The Illustrated Page for putting me onto Emily Skrutskie’s indie-published The Abyss Surrounds Us. It’s about a teenage marine biologist, Cassandra, who trains genetically engineered sea monsters (called Reckoners) to accompany merchant ships around the dangerous seas of Future America and fight off pirate attacks. But during her first solo mission, her Reckoner fails, the ship is destroyed, and Cas herself is taken prisoner. The pirate captain, Santa Elena, orders Cas to train the Reckoner pup she’s somehow acquired. If she fails, she dies. If she succeeds, she risks upsetting the delicate balance (of money…
7 CommentsGood morning! Today we’re going to talk about PRIVILEGE. (I know, you’re excited.) To be more specific, we’re going to talk about why you, a person with X privilege, just got your feelings hurt online while trying to have a good-faith conversation with someone who lacks X privilege, and you want to understand why. (Spoilers: It’s not because people who lack X privilege are “toxic.” It’s because the whole structure of privilege is.) Online conversations about diversity can be like trying to hold a math class where some of the students are doing advanced calculus and some of the students…
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