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Reading the End Posts

What to Do and Who to Be

The second week of January, I read Mychal Denzel Smith’s memoir Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching and Jesmyn Ward’s The Fire This Time, a collection of essays about America’s past and present and future. Both were published before the 2016 presidential election, and both speak with sorrow and hope about our country’s history and its potential. Smith ends his book like this: I hope my answers create a world where the Trayvons in waiting can see their own humanity. I hope I’ve fought hard enough to live long enough to see what questions they ask. I hope their…

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Breathing into a Paper Bag: A Links Round-Up

Welp, this has been a flatly terrifying week. Everyone take good care of yourself this weekend. Eat some yummy foods. Hug some puppies. We’ll be here for you on Monday. My links are mostly unscary ones because I care about you and I’m guessing your Twitter feed has been scary enough lately. Writers always wrote for money, so why do we suddenly have this idea that good writing springs purely from love? Also, why writers are so reluctant to talk about their pay in specific terms. This article is a review of the edited collection Scratch, and the one above…

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Review: Swing Time, Zadie Smith

Two biracial girls grow up in the same bit of northwest London, attending dance classes together. Tracey has real talent, and our unnamed narrator does not, and Swing Time is about the unexpected paths their lives take as they grow into adulthood. Content warning, there is very little dance school in this book. The narrator pretty quickly stops taking dance, so if you were going into Swing Time singing a little song to yourself like “dance school dance school dance school dance school,” you might end up disappointed. That’s not what I was doing or anything. It’s just something I…

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Review: The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

Well, not review exactly. There’s not much more to review in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, given how personal it is, and how tremendously of its time. But it was the first book I read in 2017 (by design), and there are elements of it that I’d like to talk about as we all stagger back to work and try and get moving again after the holidays. One thing that strikes me about James Baldwin is how little ideological slack he’s willing to cut anyone. (That is a compliment.) He’s clearly worked hard to fight free of easy answers,…

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Review: When the Moon Was Ours, Anna-Marie McLemore

When the Moon Was Ours is as good an argument as you’ll possibly ever see for the value of #ownvoices in publishing. I say that because I can’t stand magic realism and I’m not that excited about straight-up romance in YA, and When the Moon Was Ours — a magic realism romance — nevertheless still made me feel so happy and grateful for its existence. It’s the story of a Latina girl called Miel and a Pakistani-American trans boy called Sam and their struggles to come to terms with their identities and their feelings about each other and the mystical…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep. 74: What We Missed in 2016, and Alice Pung’s Lucy and Linh

Happy Wednesday! The Jennys are back to chat about what we got for Christmas, which media we didn’t get around to in 2016, and to talk about Alice Pung’s YA novel Lucy and Linh. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go! Episode 74 Two small mistakes to note: I said I received the Rebecca Solnit atlas of New Orleans, and in fact it was the atlas of New York, which is the one I would prefer to have. Also, Whiskey Jenny said John Legend has…

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Review: Death, an Oral History, by Casey Jarman

Note: I received Death: An Oral History from the publisher for review consideration. All opinions are my own. So my favorite thing about Death: An Oral History is the story of its genesis. Casey Jarman noticed that he hadn’t yet lost anyone he couldn’t afford to lose, and it started to cause him anxiety about death. He therefore decided to spend the next few years of his life talking, reading, and thinking extensively about death, with the ultimate goal of producing a collection of interviews with people familiar with death. This is very very relatable to me. I have learned…

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Shameless Self-Plugs: A Links Round-Up

I’ve been bouncing around the internets with my writing thoughts. Have some of my word-related New Year’s Resolutions over at the Oxford Dictionaries blog! Then enjoy my picks for 2016 Smugglivus, over at Book Smugglers! Maddy Myers is great, y’all. Here she is on on-screen queer kisses over at The Mary Sue. Y’all, you guys, hey everyone, guess what! England is about to get the FIRST EVER Kurdish novel to be translated into English. How cool! How good for the Kurds! I hope it publishes in the US also! This Natalie Luhrs piece for Uncanny Magazine unpacks what’s so great…

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Top Ten 2016 Releases I Meant to Read

Well, Whiskey Jenny and I are going to get into some of what we missed in 2016 in our next podcast, but luckily, there were so many books I meant to read in 2016 and didn’t read that I will NEVER RUN OUT OF ANSWERS TO THIS QUESTION. It’s Top Ten Tuesday! 10. Playing Dead: A Journey through the World of Death Fraud, Elizabeth Greenwood. Sarah mentioned this book earlier in the year, and it sounds top-notch, like maybe it would talk about the kind of crimes the Leverage team would be hired to do something about. 9. Burn, Baby,…

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Fighting Straw-Man Approximations of Your Critics Makes You Look Like an Asshole

The time: The Year of our Lord 2017. The place: Nick Spencer’s Captain America comic. No, not that one. The Sam Wilson one. The thing: I can’t even bear to summarize it because it’s so embarrassing. You will have to read this Daily Dot overview. But basically, Nick Spencer made some jokes about the rhetorical tactics of women and minorities after a bunch of women and minorities criticized his Hydra!Cap plot twist on ideological grounds. I died of embarrassment for him, and then I came back to life to write this post about why it’s a bad look to parody…

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