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Reading the End Posts

Review: I, Iago, Nicole Galland

Some years, my pal Jeanne from Necromancy Never Pays makes it down to Louisiana and stops by for a visit with my family. Last year, she so so kindly brought me a book as a gift: I, Iago, by Nicole Galland, which she said I would enjoy. (Spoiler: I did, indeed, enjoy it.) Nearly an entire year later, when I recalled that Jeanne would possibly be visiting again soon (yay!), I gave myself a stern talking-to about putting off reading books that were gifts, and I pulled I, Iago down off my TBR shelf and read it. And the thing…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep. 82 – Summer Book Preview, Paper Girls, and The Vision

It’s Wednesday and I am back from England and I absolutely promise I will not buy any more books this year. I bought a nutso number of books in London. Sorry London. Sorry suitcase. Meanwhile, we’ve got an awesome new episode for you, with plenty of talk of comics and suggested reading for the summer of 2017. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go! Episode 82 Here’s the time signatures for each segment, if you want to skip around! 1:30 – What we’re reading…

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Review: The Liminal People, Ayize Jama-Everett

The marvelous Bina reviewed The Liminal People some time ago and mentioned that it’s frequently compared to X-Men, which naturally was all the inducement I needed to buy it and its two sequels a few AWPs ago. “X-Men meets [literally anything]” = a sales pitch that will win me over 10/10 times. Taggert, our hero (ish), is a healer with the power to magically repair any ailments of the body, from wounds to asthma to cancer. He has wandered the world for most of his life, desperate to meet more people with powers like him, and his wanderings have washed…

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Review: All the Real Indians Died Off, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker

After reading An Indigenous People’s History of the United States a few years back, I was in the tank for p. much anything from Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz. All the Real Indians Died Off (and 20 Other MYths about Native Americans) is her latest book, cowritten with Colville author Dina Gilio-Whitaker, and it serves as an excellent 101 text for understanding Indian history in the US and ongoing legal, social, and economic issues. Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker (my stars they have a lot of name between them) tackle issues ranging from terminology (Indian? Native American? Indigenous?) to broken treaties (too many to count)…

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Review: Dreadnought, April Daniels

tfw basically all you have to say to convince anyone to read a book is the premise (cf: time-traveling pirates): TRANS GIRL SUPERHERO. Danny is struggling with how to tell her parents that she’s a girl when the superhero Dreadnought falls from the sky, bestows all his powers upon Danny, and magically transforms her body into a girl’s body. All at once, she has girl parts and superhero powers, and neither of those is exactly easy to explain to the people in her life. TRANS. GIRL. SUPERHERO. So in the first place, it’s terrific to read more #ownvoices books about…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep. 81: Music Reviews Game and Hari Kunzru’s White Tears

Happy Wednesday! It’s May! And we’re joined this week by special guest Ashley for Serial Box Book Club, a game about music reviews, and a discussion of Hari Kunzru’s ghost thriller White Tears. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go! Episode 81 Here’s the time signatures for each segment, if you want to skip around! 1:10 – What we’re reading 6:33 – Did Whiskey Jenny like Fast 8? 7:31 – Did we all see the new Star Wars trailer? 9:03 – Serial Box Book…

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Review: Amberlough, Lara Elena Donnelly

Oh marvelous Audra of Unabridged Chick for putting me onto Amberlough by describing it (accurately) as “a gay spy thriller that’s allegedly Le Carre meets Cabaret.” This is a terrific and accurate description, although Cabaret is already pretty gay. Please hold while I go down a rabbit hole of watching YouTube videos from Cabaret and then conclude that this piecemeal bullshit is no good and I need to watch the movie again in its entirety. Enjoy this book cover while you’re waiting. Cyril De Paul is a half-hearted spy for the government of Amberlough, one of four loosely affiliated governments…

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Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon Post

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,…

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Review: Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, Helen Young

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…

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Review: A Hundred Thousand Worlds, Bob Proehl

Bob Proehl’s book A Hundred Thousand Worlds is not RPF, but RPF resides in its bones. Valerie Torrey is a Gillian Anderson analogue who is taking her son Alex across the country to meet his estranged father Andrew, who stars in a show that sounds strangely similar to Californication. Along the way she stops at various cons, signing autographs and answering questions about her stint on a show called Anomaly, where she met Andrew in the first place. There also feature analogues of Gail Simone and Ed Brubaker and Alan Moore and a range of other comics lights, which if…

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