I’m going to say right up front that Whiskey Jenny only cries once in this episode, and I hope all y’all are impressed about that. For this month’s bonus episode (thank y’all again so much for your support), we decided to talk about the saddest books we read as kids, and Whiskey Jenny ONLY CRIES ONCE. (YES we included Where the Red Fern Grows. Come on.) (Gin Jenny, an automaton, cries zero times. She did get teary on Twitter today thinking about the characters in new Star Wars, though.) You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below,…
Leave a CommentTag: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Revisiting Harry Potter: Crying early and often
Published 12 Apr 2013
by
Gin Jenny
You guys. This book. How can everyone be so brave and good, and everything go so terribly wrong for them all the time? All through this readalong I’ve been excited to get to the final segment of Order of the Phoenix because, in my opinion, there is no finer set-piece throughout the entire series (and there are a lot of good set-pieces!) than the sequence in the Ministry. It is so fucking tense. Actually, this entire section of the book is fairly intense. Which is why this post is in a state of near-total incoherence and book quotes. Sorry. But,…
35 CommentsRevisiting Harry Potter: Defending Sirius, Part 2
Published 5 Apr 2013
by
Gin Jenny
I will acknowledge the following up front: Sirius is a little pissy in this book. At one point, he is pissy to Harry, and it hurts Harry’s feelings. My thesis is that you would be too so dial down the judgment. I’m going to take this to a slightly personal place right now. Bear with me. 2012 was an awful awful year, and the quality of its awfulness to my family was lots and lots and lots of unrelenting Life Stress. The quality of its awfulness to me, since I live far away, was lots and lots and lots of…
31 CommentsBooking Through Thursday
Published 5 Jun 2009
by
Gin Jenny
I like this one: This can be a quick one. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. So here are my fifteen books that will always stick with me, more or less in the order in which they entered my life: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte Emily Climbs, L.M .Montgomery Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card Macbeth, William Shakespeare The Chosen, Chaim Potok The Color Purple, Alice Walker Harry Potter and…
10 CommentsHarry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling
Published 2 Nov 2008
by
Gin Jenny
I saw this graph one time on something connected with the Lemony Snicket books, and it showed how as time went on, the number of fortunate events decreased. And that is what I always think of when I read the fifth Harry Potter book. It contains so many depressing things – dementors, Umbridge, writing lines in blood, everyone thinking Harry is crazy, an acknowledgement of Harry’s psychological issues, Cho Chang – and the end makes me feel so very, very sad, for Harry and for Dumbledore. I stayed up until midnight for this book when it came out, at the…
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Revisiting Harry Potter: I have nothing to say about Grawp
I’m not going to do a big post defending Harry because nobody on this readalong is saying Harry doesn’t deserve to get angry. Everyone who minds this book just says that reading about Harry yelling at everyone all the time is not fun. Which, fair enough. I do not mind it but I can see why a person would. Isn’t it kind of heartbreaking, by the way, to see who Harry does and doesn’t lose his temper with in this book? He stomps all over Ron and Hermione because he doesn’t consider them an emotional flight risk. But he hardly…
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