Happy Friday, everyone! How to cull your books: The Awl guide. Let me tell you my method, team. Take all the books. Line them up on the floor, right to left, by how much you love them. Then draw a line somewhere in the middle of that long line of books and cull everything to the left of your line. Boom. Done. More on fan entitlement (and a bit of side-eye for Steven Moffat, which I am never not here for) from The Mary Sue. I’m really digging Maddie Myers’s work on The Mary Sue these days, y’all! Go follow…
11 CommentsReading the End Posts
Hex is the scariest book I’ve ever read. Hex was so scary that when I was reading it in bed, I got too frightened to continue and also had to walk around the upstairs of my apartment checking the closets for bad guys/ghosts/monsters. Hex was so scary that I thereafter stopped reading it before bed and only read it during my commute. The basic premise seemed fine. There’s this town called Black Spring where once upon a time a woman called Katherine was forced to murder her own son, then hanged as a witch. Her ghost has haunted the town…
34 CommentsHappy Friday, everyone! Today I’m linking you to the adventures of me, elsewhere! The lovely Shiny New Books has out a brand new issue, and my lovely pal Memory and I are in it, recommending you all the best YA of the summer and being heartfelt. Viz: I think of the sort of fiction I had access to when I was a teenager, and I look at what’s available to today’s young people, and I’m beyond happy for them. The trans kids get to see themselves on the page and the cis kids get to experience the world through someone…
6 CommentsI know y’all had given us up for dead but the triumphal return of the Reading the End Bookcast has finally arrived! Whiskey Jenny and I return to talk about that whole Harry Potter / magic in America debacle, then to discuss authors who can’t leave their fictional worlds behind. We review (finally) Simon van Booy’s Father’s Day, and we answer a burning question from listener Ashley. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go! Episode 63 Note: We experienced so many technical difficulties in…
1 CommentY’all. This tag. The Disney Song Book Tag was created by Aria’s Books, and I picked it up from Rachel at Life of a Female Bibliophile. 1. “A Whole New World” – Pick a book that made you see the world differently. This may not count, because I barely saw the world at all prior to reading these books. However, I’m still choosing the Chronicles of Narnia. My mother read these books to me and my sister starting when I was three, so there’s not much in my life that didn’t get put through the Chronicles of Narnia goggles. I…
22 CommentsI decided to take a break from having sad links and only have happy links. So you can look forward to some gay Sulu, bonkers Oscar Wilde adjacence, and Catullus telling people to go fuck themselves (he does that so well). Bahahaha Constance Holland (nee Lloyd; formerly Wilde) has a fake gravestone at a cemetery in Spain. OF COURSE SHE DOES God I love Oscar Wilde stories. American literature needs indie publishers, says The Atlantic. They don’t exactly go deep on the point that indie presses are an avenue for publishing more marginalized voices, so if y’all have a recent…
9 CommentsY’all, I love Mariko Tamaki. If I were in charge of the universe, I’d request that Mariko Tamaki subsequently do like romance authors and write one book for each of the notable minor characters in Saving Montgomery Sole.1 Saving Montgomery Sole is about a girl with two moms who struggles to fit in to her glossy, carb-hating California high school; and then a Jerry Falwell-type preacher comes to town, and Montgomery is certain that her family will be a target for his hostility. Mariko Tamaki hated high school and has said in interviews that she always struggled to fit in. In…
7 CommentsAre y’all ready for me to EXPLODE YOUR MIND GRAPES? Because the reason I read Bronwyn Dickey’s Pit Bull was this one interview that led me to some internet research that EXPLODED MY MIND GRAPES. Bronwyn Dickey said in this interview that we really don’t know anything about pit bull dog bites. And I was like, Um, okay, Bronwyn Dickey, I agree with you that pit bulls are misunderstood, but we know some stuff about pit bull dog bites, and because not knowing things drives me crazy, I went down an Internet rabbit hole researching dog bite statistics. Team. Team. Listen. We know…
32 CommentsYou May Also Like attempts to fathom the question of why people like what they like. Before reading this book, you’d probably answer “It’s complicated.” But after you read it? You’ll, um, you’ll still say it’s complicated. Human brains are complicated organs, and we are just not very good at understanding them. When I’m reading pop sciencey sorts of books, I am on a hair trigger with regard to bullshit neuroscience of the type that Cordelia Fine has conditioned me to be on a hair trigger w/r/t; i.e., that thing where it’s like “the same part of your brain lights…
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