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Reading the End Posts

Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.26: Movie Adaptations, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and an Adapted Title Game

The Jennys return to talk book-to-movie adaptations in the upcoming months! We discuss some of the movies that are coming up, and then we review Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and then we play what some have called the greatest game ever on the podcast. (Judge for yourself.) You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 26 Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very…

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Someone has to decide which animals go extinct

Have y’all ever thought about that before? I had not! But I was reading the 2013 Best American Science and Nature Writing, edited this year by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and an essay by Michelle Nijhuis from Scientific American blew my mind out of the back of my skull. Someone has to decide which animals go extinct! Even if that is not the exact decision that gets made, it’s effectively still true: When resources are finite (and they always are), choosing to save one species means you have chosen not to save another one. If you aren’t in denial about this truth,…

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Review: The Last Illusion, Porochista Khakpour

The albino boy Zal is born in a rural Iranian village to a mother horrified by his appearance. She calls him the White Demon, puts him in a birdcage, and keeps him there for the first ten years of his life. Finally, he’s freed from his cage and brought to America by a behavioral analyst determined to give Zal a normal life. Zal reaches adulthood(ish) still haunted by the dreams of his past as a bird, and as he tries to figure out how to be normal, he becomes involved with an artist called Asiya who has visions of disaster…

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Review: The Dream Thieves, Maggie Stiefvater

Note: There will be some spoilers for The Raven Boys in this post, but I will try to steer clear of spoiling The Dream Thieves. After finishing The Raven Boys, I wanted to go out to the bookstore and buy The Dream Thieves in hardback. But since I almost never buy new hardbacks, and some people didn’t like The Dream Thieves as much, I instead put a sensible hold on the ebook copy at my library. The hold came in (blessedly promptly), and I read twenty pages of it, then the end, and then I went to Barnes & Noble…

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Review and Giveaway: Alias Hook, Lisa Jensen

Note: I received a copy of Alias Hook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. When publishers release their seasonal catalogues, I make note of all the books that sound interesting, in my TBR spreadsheet. This is to stop myself from immediately requesting 50 review books, which would only lead to my having way too many books to read and not enough time to read them all. So usually what happens is that I forget about all of them until they’re already published and I can just get them from the library. In the case of Alias Hook,…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.25; Half-Year in Review, Sarah Lotz’s The Three, and a Wedding Game

Back from hiatus, the Jennys review the reading year thus far: What disappointed us, what thrilled us, and what are we looking forward to in the second half? We review Sarah Lotz’s book The Three, we play a game of Whiskey Jenny’s invention, and we answer a piece of listener mail about binge-reading. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 25 Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We…

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Review: My Real Children, Jo Walton

Jo Walton has carved out a very nice niche of deniably speculative fiction, in which supernatural elements are so lightly present that you could blink and miss them. Among Others caps off a full book of uncertainty about the reality of magic (by the reader — Mori believes it all along) with a legitimately otherworld fight that puts paid to any doubts you might have had. My Real Children (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) goes even lighter on the magic; when Patricia makes her decision at the end, she might as easily be senile as brave. Patricia Cowan is…

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Review: Skim, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

“Being sixteen is officially the worst thing I’ve ever been,” says Kimberly Keiko Cameron at one point in the comic Skim. And the book certainly reminds you of all the things about being sixteen that were garbage — if not Kim’s particular problems, then certainly the general experience of being sixteen. Called “Skim” as an unkind joke — she isn’t slender, white, and blonde like the popular girls — Kim is an outsider at her private high school. She’s not an outsider in a Carrie way, but more in the sense that high school makes so many people outsiders: that…

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Review: Legend and Prodigy, Marie Lu

Here’s what I did that was foolish. I read Legend (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository), liked it, and considered writing my review of it right then. But my computer was kind of far away, and The Raven Boys was right next to my chair. So I read The Raven Boys. Now I can’t think about anything except for The Raven Boys. I’m going to do my best by Legend and the sequel, Prodigy, which I read on the Fourth of July. After failing the exams that would have given him a place in society, Day fled his home and…

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Gin Jenny Becomes a Cog in the Maggie Stiefvater Propaganda Machine (a review of The Raven Boys)

One time a while ago, Anastasia tweeted at me “OMG THE QUEEN OF ATTOLIA IS SO GOOD SEND HELP” (The Queen of Attolia is indeed so good you will definitely need help to be sent). While I was reading The Raven Boys, I wanted to take that whole tweet, substitute The Raven Boys for the title, and tweet it approximately every twenty pages. After a rocky start in which I engaged in some cranky grumbling about all the times Ana and Memory and Anastasia and Jill had been simultaneously wrong about a book (NB this has never happened), around page…

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