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Reading the End Posts

The best thing that happened in Marvel’s Civil War event

…was this: Clint Barton sees Kate Bishop for the first time (click to embiggen). Basically Clint sees Kate and is like this: Plus, Matt Fraction — who wrote for the Civil War event, though not that particular issue up there — calls it back in the second issue of Hawkeye, the one where we meet Kate. Overall, however, Civil War was…kind of a downer. Perhaps if Kate and Clint had hung out more?

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.42: Fictional Fathers, Anna Freeman’s The Fair Fight, and a Slang Game

Happy (belated) Father’s Day to the fathers among you! This week, we welcome special guest star Ashley (we are so sorry about the crackly mic) to talk about fictional fathers, The Fair Fight (about lady boxers in the 1800s), play a game, and answer some listener mail. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 42 Here’s Ashley’s movie column on Fiction Advocate, if you’re interested (and you should be)! Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and…

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Over at Lady Business!

I’ll have the podcast up later today, but I wanted to first mention that the wonderful site Lady Business is running a Women in Authority week (or as I described it to myself in order to make my choice of topic plausible, Ladies in Business), and they asked me for a guest post! Behold a quick post about one of my favorite books ever, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

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I FEEL GLUM: A links round-up

Jerry Seinfeld is weirdly on a tear about the PC police being the death of comedy. Here are Emily Nussbaum of the New Yorker and Linda Holmes of NPR making me happy on Twitter with their rebuttals. Stacia Brown on the racial prism, saying some super true truths about New Haven, CT, where I lived for a few months. On teaching diverse literature. A round-up of reactions to the utter madness of Rachel Dolezal, of which my favorite is the Guardian article by Meredith Talusan. Plus one more from Jamilah Lemieux. For real, though, authors: Don’t respond to negative reviews…

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The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies, Martin Millar

Note: I received a copy of The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies from the publisher, Soft Skull Press, for review consideration. Martin Millar writes books like classic British sitcoms, where there is a central organizing event (or several) around which the action is oriented, and the characters all have their separate and incompatible visions for what is to happen at this event, and everything goes magnificently to hell, and then in the end it all turns out okay, or doesn’t. Whether or not this works for you as a structure will most likely be the determining factor in whether you…

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Fic, Anne Jamison

By a stroke of good fortune, I happened to read Joanna Russ’s feminist classic How to Suppress Women’s Writing just prior to reading Anne Jamison’s Fic (Smart Pop Books), which made for an interesting pairing. On one hand, Russ’s book feels depressingly current: You need only spend a few minutes on Twitter to witness all of the tactics for suppressing women’s writing that Russ details. But on the other hand, even with all of these tactics being leveled at the (mostly female) writers of fanfiction (especially the “poor author too pathetic and forlorn to get a man” trope), here we…

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Hiding in Plain Sight, Nuruddin Farah

Sometimes when you impulse-pick up the newest book by a famous author you have never tried before, it turns out to be a mistake because their latest book is not their best book, but you don’t know that, so what you think is, I don’t like this author. When maybe what you’ve just done is write off J. R. R. Tolkien because you didn’t like The Silmarillion. I wasn’t, in short, wild about Hiding in Plain Sight. It’s about a woman named Bella who suddenly becomes guardian to her niece and nephew after their father, her beloved older brother Aar,…

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Shirley Jackson Reading Week (13-18 July)

Get pumped, you aficionados of the weird and creepy! This July 13th through 18th is going to be Shirley Jackson Reading Week, a time to revisit everyone’s favorite spooky-ass author or, if you’ve never read one of her books, meet her for the first time! Simon of Stuck in a Book, Ana of Things Mean a Lot, and I are the co-hosts for this event, and we hope you’ll join us! Lucky for you, the good folks at Penguin have put all of Jackson’s books back into print, so you’ll have the pick of the litter. If this is your first time out,…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.41: Guilty Reads, I’ll Give You the Sun, and a Game about Titles

This week, the Jennys are trying to get over feeling guilty about their guilty pleasures (but still, we have some). We review Jandy Nelson’s wonderful YA novel I’ll Give You the Sun, and we play an amazing game invented by Simon. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 41 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…

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