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Reading the End Posts

Ten (well, six) Books for Which My Feelings Have Changed

Happy Tuesday, friends! The Broke and the Bookish are, as ever, hosting a Top Ten Tuesday, and I love the question for this week: Ten Books I Feel Differently About After Time Has Passed (less love, more love, complicated feelings, indifference, thought it was great in a genre until you became more well read in that genre etc.) I couldn’t think of ten — my initial responses to most of the books I read continue to hold true on rereads — but here are six, anyway! 1. Emma, by Jane Austen – I think the problem here is that I…

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The Girl from Everywhere, Heidi Heilig

TIME TRAVELING PIRATES. This book The Girl from Everywhere is all about time traveling pirates. The Girl from Everywhere is about TIME TRAVELING PIRATES. Just so you know. At sixteen, Nix has sailed everywhere from the lands of the Arabian Nights to present-day New York to eighteenth-century Calcutta — if her crew can find a map of a place, she and her father can sail them there. But all her father truly wants is to find a map of Hawaii in the year that Nix was born, so that he can prevent her mother from dying in childbirth. As long…

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Side-eyes for Tina Fey: A links round-up

Who debunks the debunkers? Get pumped: NPR’s Code Switch, your source for excellent conversations about race and American culture, will soon be a podcast! The first episode drops May 31st. Sharing your favorite stories with your kids: An impossibly adorable story starring Luke Skylocker. A seriously great black feminist roundtable in response to bell hooks’s response to Beyonce’s new music video; and a reminder why it’s awesome to live now and have all these amazing, smart, thoughtful voices available for us to listen to. Sob! The Toast is closing! Where will I get my art history jokes now? Tina Fey…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.61: Summer Book Preview and Katie Heaney’s Dear Emma

Happy Hump Day to you all, beloved listeners! It’s time for another seasonal book preview (the most wonderful four times of the year) (except for Christmas, Christmas is still the actual most wonderful time). Whiskey Jenny and I also answer some listener mail, update you on what we’re reading, and review the fluffy, fun Dear Emma, by Katie Heaney. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go! Episode 61 What We’re Reading City on Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg The Summer before the War, Helen Simonson…

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The Secret Life of the American Musical, Jack Viertel

Jack Viertel’s The Secret Life of the American Musical (hat-tip to the fabulous Kim for the recommendation!) isn’t a history of the American musical — a thing about which I would not care at all1 — but rather a dissection of what goes into making it. Viertel breaks down an array of musicals, from Gypsy to Hamilton, into their component parts to explore what makes their engines run. Some of this I was already familiar with, like the not-a-rule-but-sort-of-a-rule that the protagonist has to sing an “I Want” song early on, to get the audience on board with whatever the stakes are…

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SEEMS LIKE YOU ARE ALL HAVING FUN AT BEA

Not that I am bitter. (I’m not.) But since I wasn’t able to make it this year1, please pop by in the comments and tell me one lovely thing that is happening at BEA. Or if like me you couldn’t go this year, tell me only lovely thing that has happened to you this week. Also, this is your final notice that today is Friday the 13th. Take all reasonable precautions. or any year, thus far? I mainly care about meeting bloggers, and I can do that fine without actually being inside of a convention center ↩

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Repercussions, Anthony Schneider

Did I ever tell you about my fondness for aftermath? Stories about aftermaths are all I long for, all I worship and adore. In fact when I finish writing this post I might just go read the bit about the Scouring of the Shire. Repercussions is about aftermath, and it’s about a thing I don’t get nearly enough of in contemporary adult fiction, which is good people who are trying their best. Henry Wegland is a Lithuanian Jew whose family came to South Africa years ago in the assumption that they would find a better way of life. Henry has…

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Women as Prizes (Daniel Suarez’s Influx)

Look, here’s the thing. Let me tell you what the thing is. If you say “sci-fi retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo,” I am going to read that book even if I have to go to several different libraries to get it, which is how Influx, by Daniel Suarez, became one of the oldest books on my TBR spreadsheet, which is how I came to be reading it in the car on a recent road trip. (That’s not the thing.) Influx is about a man called Jon Grady who is such a Maverick that he invents a thing called…

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Richard Sherman and Eurovision: A Links Round-Up

How the whales have won (at Sea World). Note that this article describes people having their limbs torn off by orcas. Also note that orcas have never killed a human in the wild, I JUST MENTION IT. “We are not in a golden age of nuance”: A really remarkably good review of Marvel’s Civil War, from Linda Holmes at NPR’s Monkeysee. We really do seem to talk about trigger warnings more than encounter them, don’t we? Laurie Penny responds to Stephen Fry’s outburst of rage re: trigger warnings.1 Why white people tend to be so terrible about discussing race, and…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.60: Science vs Magic and All the Birds in the Sky

Happy Wednesday, and May the Fourth Be With You! We welcome back special guest star Ashley to discuss All the Birds in the Sky and have a wee showdown between books about science and books about magic. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go! Episode 60 Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating!…

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