Here’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 CommentsReading the End Posts
We 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…
26 CommentsIt’s Friday, friends, and I’m working all day tomorrow at a conference. Here’s hoping that you have a wonderful and restful weekend, and that if I don’t get enough sleep (I won’t) or find a reasonable place to park (I won’t), I at least manage to buy some terrific books at discount last-day-of-conference prices. All the excuses people give for making shitty racist movies, and why none of them are that convincing. (Clap your hands if you are pleased to see Ghost in the Shell bombing.) On feminist SF writers and the dystopian worlds they create. And it’s got a…
10 CommentsUsing a Marvel Unlimited gift code from my beautiful pal Memory (thanks Memory!), I finally read Marjorie Liu’s run on X-23, just in time to know a bit about the character before watching OLD MAN LOGAN MOVIE. The run went through several artists, my favorite of which obviously was Sana Takeda, with Phil Noto as a close second. If you’re not au courant with what was happening to the X-Men around the time this series came out (early 2010s), there’s kind of a lot to catch up on, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend this series as a starting place for…
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