THIS IS LATE and many of these links are now old, but hopefully you will still love me. You do, right? Just in case, I’ve made my first link super fascinating. And also, let me point out that today is Oscar Wilde’s birthday! Happy birthday, my dearest Oscar Wilde! The rules for inventing a ship name, using linguistics. Romance author KJ Charles on how to take an edit. Tired of making fun of Jonathan Franzen? I’M NOT. Brian Friel, author of Translations and numerous other plays, and virtually the only Irish author I’ve ever loved, has died. Did I mention…
11 CommentsReading the End Posts
I have never been so excited to get back to a monastery. The next section of the Monkalong (hosted by the fabulous Alice of Reading Rambo!) returns us to the titular character, THE MONK, who experiences brief but intense postcoital regret, which Matilda quickly talks him out of. Using wiles. Quote: “Ambrosio rioted in delights till then unknown to him.” Ahahahahahahahahahaha. I would read three more chapters about Ambrosio discovering sex. Ambrosio discovers hand jobs! Ambrosio discovers oral! Ambrosio buys a butt plug! Okay, but then, because THE MONK is a garbage human being and he always was, he starts…
11 CommentsSo okay. If you have read Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer, which I have, or if you are interested in true crime, which I am not, you may have heard of this guy Jeffrey MacDonald, whose wife and two daughters were murdered and he said hippies did it. A Wilderness of Error is about this case and the many flaws and unreasonablenesses about the case the government (and popular culture) built against Jeffrey MacDonald. Morris has done an extraordinary amount of research into this case, conducting interviews with everyone who was involved in the case and survived to the…
23 CommentsY’all, I was mad at this section of the readalong, but can I confess something real quick? The person I was really mad at . . . was me. When I wrote my post for Monkalong Part 1, I didn’t say anything about Lorenzo’s sister Agnes, who got pregnant WHILE A NUN. In my defense, so many goddamn things happened in the first two chapters that it was really hard to figure out where to focus my attention, and THE MONK was just more interesting than poor old Agnes, as well as being, you know, the eponymous character. Obviously Matthew…
12 CommentsAfter some technical difficulties and life events intervening in our recording schedule, the Jennys are back at last! We celebrate some bookish news, discuss fictional morality and how it differs from regular life morality, and review Patrick DeWitt’s book The Sisters Brothers. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 48 Books discussed in this podcast are listed, in order, below. Washington Post on the news of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s run on Black Panther Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan You can no longer listen…
1 CommentHave I told you that I love it in books when characters mishear each other? It’s one of my favorite things because it happens in life all the time and in books almost never. Here is a misheard conversation from somewhere in the middle of Make Your Home Among Strangers: I was just about to hang up on him when he asked, So you hear yet? –Omar, I told you I’ve been here, but I’m leaving. –No, I mean the thing at school. The investigation thing. What happened? –Oh that. Misunderstanding is central to this book about a first-generation college…
9 CommentsThat’s right, folks, we badgered Alice into hosting another readalong! And I confidently anticipate that we will badger her into more in 2016, but for now let’s focus on Matthew Gregory Lewis’s Gothic classic The Monk, because the Monkalong has officially begun! The titular MONK (an official readalong style guide has not yet been released, but I have to assume that it will stipulate the word MONK must appear in all caps when referring to the eponymous one) is Ambrosio, a man of mysterious background and flawless morals who is basically the One Direction of eighteenth-century Madrid, except he uses…
24 CommentsI am but human, friends. If you cut me, do I not bleed? If you design a supercool cover for a book about magical London, do I not eventually give in and get that book from the library? The protagonist of A Darker Shade of Magic, Kell, is a messenger between three separate Londons: In his own, Red London, where magic is common but his type of magic, Antari magic, is all too rare, he is something like a prince and something like a possession. In Grey London, he trades jokes with a mad king and meets a girl thief…
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