Episode 146

Things We Discussed

Sweat, Lynn Nottage
“A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department”
Kim’s Convenience
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Oscar Isaac training to play Moon Knight
Babylon 5
Black Sails
Sense8
Envy, Sandra Brown
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey
Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff
Sarah McCarry
Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall
Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake, Alexis Hall
Archivist Wasp, Nicole Kornher-Stace
Mort(e), Robert Repino

Gin Jenny’s Picks

The Rib King, Ladee Hubbard
The Mirror Season, Anna-Marie McLemore
Renegade Flight, Andrea Tang (companion novel to Rebelwing)
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Sorrowland, Rivers Solomon
Black Water Sister, Zen Cho
Firebreak, Nicole Kornher-Stace
The Library of the Dead, TL Huchu
The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo
The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri

Whiskey Jenny’s Picks

Quiet in Her Bones, Nalini Singh
Accidentally Engaged, Farah Heron
Lightseekers, Femi Kayode
Dial A for Aunties, Jesse Q. Sutanto
Malefactor, Robert Repino

Star of the Sea, Joseph O’Connor

You can get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. As a brand new feature, you can also follow me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Storygraph! If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. 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 much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour

Transcript

WJ: Hello, and welcome back to the Reading the End Bookcast with the Demographically Similar Jennys. I’m Whiskey Jenny.

GJ: And I’m Gin Jenny!

WJ: And we are thrilled to be back talking about books and literary happenings. On today’s podcast, we are going to talk about what we’re reading; we’re going to talk about what we’re watching. We will preview the first half of 2021 in books, and we will embark upon the Hatening, Part One. Did you like my boat pun, embark?

GJ: Yes. Oh my gosh. Oh, so strong. That’s fantastic; way to go.

WJ: The Hatening, Part One, for which I picked a book that I thought I would like and Gin Jenny would hate, which was Star of the Sea, by Joseph O’Connor. And then we get to find out what Gin Jenny has Hatened for the reverse, when the shoe will be on the other table. But before we get into that, what are you reading, Gin Jenny?

GJ: So I am reading a play called Sweat by Lynn Nottage, which I believe either it or she won the Pulitzer. She might have won the Pulitzer for a different play. But it’s about a group of friends who work at a paper mill, I think, and there’s a union and there’s like union busting, I think.

WJ: Boooooo.

GJ: And at some point, the sons of some of the friends do a crime, because the play starts out eight years in the future, and the sons are both like talking to maybe a parole officer sort of a person.

WJ: So it’s modern day?

GJ: Yeah, their original timeline is in 2000, and the jump forward is to 2008. So present day ish.

WJ: So is there a Richard Armitage type character?

GJ: No, no Richard Armitage type character.

WJ: From North and South, no?

GJ: So that’s what I’m reading. What are you reading?

WJ: What I’m reading is not a book, but it’s a long journalism series. Is that a thing?

GJ: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

WJ: Multi-part investigative journalism series. So it’s by Cerise Castle, and it’s about gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

GJ: So, uplifting reading.

WJ: But I just want to clarify, it’s about gangs of sheriffs. The gang members are the sheriffs.

GJ: I’m nodding sadly.

WJ: And the whole series is called “A Tradition of Violence.” It’s available online at knock-la.com. I’ve only been able to read the first section so far, and it is a wild ride. Like it’s insane, and also horrifying. But it’s really interestingly reported, and I am looking forward– Not looking forward;  I am going to read the next article to continue my education.

GJ: Oh, well. Good work!

WJ: Thanks!

GJ: What are you– Well, hopefully you’re watching something a little more cheerful.

WJ: I am! I’ve been watching Kim’s Convenience on Netflix.

GJ: Oh, how is it? It’s been on my list forever!

WJ: I really like it. It’s so sweet. It’s a little more sort of emotional and angsty than I normally would have wanted, but everything is mostly okay. Like it gets resolved.

GJ: Okay, so how emotionally angsty is it on a scale between like, New Girl and One Day at a Time?

WJ: I have not seen one day at a time.

GJ: Oh yeah, you would cry a lot so that’s fair.

WJ: I need another top end for the scale. Well, more than New Girl…

GJ: Out of every five episodes, how many do you think you cry during?

WJ: I don’t know that I’m a good bellwether for that.

GJ: So all of them?

WJ: Yeah.

GJ: Okay. You’re right. That was a foolish question.

WJ: What does cry mean, really? Oh, and also there’s a really handsome man in it. I think he’s gonna be in a Marvel something something. When I first saw him, I was like, Jesus Christ, this man is like really attractive and like really buff for this part? Like, he is in Marvel shape! And then it turns out it’s because he is going to be in a Marvel property.

GJ: Oh, great. I saw a video of Oscar Isaac training to be in a Marvel and it was a very good video.

WJ: His name is Simu Liu. He’s gonna be Shang-Chi.

GJ: Okay, in what?

WJ: Shang Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings.

GJ: Oh, he is very good looking!

WJ: So good looking! I don’t know what the Marvel workout thing is, but I would never want to do it.

GJ: Oh my God, me neither. To be clear, he wasn’t like doing like exercises. He was like practicing fight scenes.

WJ: Oh, that’s fun!

GJ: Yeah, it was very fun!

WJ: What are you watching?

GJ: What am I watching? I’m watching Babylon Five, which is an older sci fi series. My friends told me it was her Black Sails. She really wanted me to watch it, and she was like, It is to me as Black Sails is to you. And I was like, well, you know, in the interests of friendship. It’s by the same writer who wrote Sense8. So it has a similar like, slow start, but I think I’m getting into the meat of it now. It’s pretty dark. And there’s like religion stuff in it, which is kind of like fun and interesting and dark. And yeah, I’m enjoying it. It’s very like thinky SF, and the production values are what you would expect from 1990s science fiction TV, but I think they make it work pretty well. And they have interesting like, not monster of the week, but like problem of the week episodes, and I’ve been given to understand that the ongoing story arcs are also very strong. So I’m excited to get further into it. I’m like, middle of season one, I think.

WJ: Before we move into spring preview, I would like to introduce a new segment, which is an update on the mailbox books.

GJ: Oh, fantastic! That’s such a good segment! Go!

WJ: Mostly because I wanted to complain about this one thing.

GJ: This is great. This is like when a friend texts soon is like, Can I be really petty for a second?

WJ: This is me being really petty. My mom got from the mailbox library a book called Envy by Sandra Brown, like one of those thriller romance sort of a genre. She returned it because it had an unreliable narrator, which I did not know she was also not a fan of but she was like, No. Get that out of the house.

GJ: Runs in families.

WJ: I came by it honest. But near it on the bookshelf was a book by Stephen Covey. Do you remember this guy? The like Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?

GJ: Oh, sure. Sure.

WJ: This man had the gall to come up with a book called The Eighth Habit.

GJ: [gasp]

WJ: Right?

GJ: Oh my God! He has enough gall to be divided into three parts. I’m outraged.

WJ: The eighth habit? You held this back from the first book? The whole premise was that there were seven habits!

GJ: Well, and the other thing is, once you start with this, once you say Oh, actually there’s eight habits, like there could be an infinite number of habits now!

WJ: Where does it end?

GJ: We’ve lost faith in you now!

WJ: I was appalled. I couldn’t believe it.

GJ: I’m horrified.

WJ: So that’s the update from the mailroom. Also, I liked your gall joke.

GJ: I actually have a mailbox update as well. It’s a little free library update. Okay, so as I was looking for a Hatening book to Haten you with–

WJ: I’m so excited.

GJ: I was looking at like some books on my shelves, some books that I have on my like various lists, books in the library, etc. I had Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff on my shelves, which I had picked up from a little free library. And I was like, doesn’t that have an unreliable narrator? Because I remember people talking about it in the same breath as Gone Girl, and I don’t think it had quite the same type of twist as Gone Girl. But I thought I remembered it being something like that. So I picked it up, and I was kind of looking through it. And I was like, this seems like it has like some suburbia-is-soul-killing content that Whiskey Jenny would really hate, but I was nervous because I didn’t know what the twist was going to be, and I didn’t want to accidentally haten, you for something really horrible. So I went online and looked up spoilers and it sounds awful. I’m just gonna give it back. It looks like both of us would hate it a lot.

WJ: Oh, no! What is the plot?

GJ: Well, so I don’t know the whole thing. But it’s this couple that gets married and blah, blah, blah, they have whatever suburban life they have, and then they go to like a party or something, and the husband finds out that the wife did not come to him a virgin and he’s very upset. It’s like set in, like, now times!

WJ: What the hey?

GJ: Anyway, he’s a real jerk to her, and he finds out she was once a kept woman by this guy that they meet at the art gallery or whatever.

WJ: And it’s definitely modern times? Boy!

GJ: Anyway, so then it’s like all about her horrible life and the like humiliating life she had when she was this guy’s kept woman and how she like schemed to get this second guy to fall in love with her and get married. It just seemed really like grim and sordid, and like it would just depress me no end. And I thought you would hate it, but I also now feel like I would hate it.

WJ: Yeah, not quite the point.

GJ: Yeah, so I’m returning that son of a gun to the little free library. And I wish others joy of it.

WJ: Godspeed. I think many people loved it.

GJ: I’m excited to be able to just get it off my shelves because as you know, I love culling books.

WJ: Yeah! You can let it go.

GJ: Yeah, as the bard says. So we want to talk about books we’re excited for in the first half ish of 2021. And I picked a lot, so I’m going to do two to every Whiskey Jenny’s one. I plead that you bear with me.

WJ: I’m very excited to hear what they are.

GJ: Yeah, I mean, there’s some really good books coming out. Okay, so my first one is called The Rib King by Ladee Hubbard, which came out in January from Amistad Press. And it’s about a well to do white family with a large staff of like maids, cooks, etc, who are all Black, and the family falls on hard times, so to get money going, the patriarch sells his Black cook’s recipe for rib sauce, which is really legendary, like using a lot of racist caricatures on the packaging and in the marketing. So that’s the first half of the book and then the second half skips ahead 10 years later, and it’s dealing with a Black woman named Jenny, who used to be a maid for this family and she’s trying to get her own business off the ground selling beauty products, but she kind of can’t get out from under the shadow of this white family. So it sounds really weird and interesting. And I’m excited to read it. I heard a lot of good things about this author’s first book, which might have been short stories.

WJ: Yeah, I like that concept. I feel like food justice and colonialism getting reckoned with in food writing as well is on the rise, which I love. And I’m excited to see that in fiction as well.

GJ: Yeah, it’s always so fascinating when I read like journalism about it. So yeah, I’m also excited to see it in fiction. Then my next one is The Mirror Season by Anna Marie McLemore. coming out in March from– Well, so, is out now from Feiwel & Friends. Anna-Marie McLemore writes, these extremely beautiful, like magic realism-y queer YA novels that are based on fairy tales. So if you liked Sarah McCarry, which I feel like people who liked Sarah McCarry are like feral for Sarah McCarry, but she wasn’t that well known. And I feel like she didn’t hit it quite the right time. But Anna-Marie McLemore’s books are a lot like that. This one’s based on the Snow Queen. And I think the subject matter is pretty tough. I think it’s about two kids who two teenagers who get sexually assaulted at a party and kind of form a relationship after that. So content warnings, for sure. But this author’s books have been so consistently amazing. And every time they come out with a new one, I’m just like, really thrilled. Their writing is gorgeous. What is your first book for 2021?

WJ: My first book came out in February from Berkeley. It’s called Quiet in her Bones, which I think is an amazing title.

GJ: Such a good title!

WJ: By Nalini Singh. It’s a mystery set in New Zealand. So I believe it’s a rich cul de sac. Those cul-de-sacs are just rife with murder.

GJ: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That sounds great. I love a rich cul de sac murder.

WJ: So rich cul de sac near a forest, and I really like the hopefully juxtaposition of the wild and the developed. I believe our narrator’s mother disappeared 10 years ago, and then they just now found her body in those forests. So she didn’t just run away. She got murdered.

GJ: Oh, damn!

WJ: I know! And then also in that description, and everyone thought she just like ran away and stole a bunch of money from rich people or something, but nope, she got murdered. And then also it’s like, her son, who heard a bloodcurdling scream on the night she disappeared, like, won’t rest until the truth. And it’s like, now you’re like, oh, maybe that scream was– Like, wouldn’t you have been like, oh, I wonder what that scream was that I heard that night my mother disappeared forever. Oh, well, probably fine!

GJ: How old was he at the time, though?

WJ: I don’t know. Yeah, I’m sure it all will become explained. He is now old enough to do an investigation. So he was minus 10 from that. I don’t know.

GJ: Have you read anything by Nalini Singh before? Because she writes romance novels that people really love that I haven’t read yet.

WJ: I didn’t know that. Have you?

GJ: No, I haven’t. But I hear really good things. They’re paranormal romance.

WJ: So what’s your next two?

GJ: The first one is Renegade Flight by Andrea Tang which came out in March from Razorbill. I really enjoyed her first YA novel,Rebelwing, and this is a companion novel. So it takes place like 15 years after the first one, I think, which I think is a fun time jump. I love a companion novel. And it’s about a girl who goes to like an elite pilot school for piloting dragon mechs. And she’s supposed to find out why peacekeepers keep going missing. I don’t know what that means, but I love an elite school book, and the first one was really fun. It’s like pilot shenanigans, making friends with people. It just sounds like a extremely fun adventure story.

WJ: Did you say dragon mechs? They’re piloting like, built dragons?

GJ: Yeah, like dragon machines? Yeah.

WJ: Boy. That’s cool.

GJ: Yeah!

WJ: Was that in the first one?

GJ: Yes.

WJ: Boy, that sounds great.

GJ: Yeah, I know. And then my next one, which I think is my only nonfiction one is the disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescott Weinstein, which came out in March from Bold Type Books. It’s about particle physics, which I don’t understand. But it also takes a look at how the science profession fails to include marginalized people, because the author is a Black queer woman in science. And I’m very daunted by the science side of things, and I may end up skimming some of that. But I’m really going to give it a try and I think even if I can’t understand the particle physics, which seems pretty likely, I’m still interested in kind of the like, sociology of science stuff.

WJ: Yeah, sounds cool.

GJ: Yeah. What’s your next one?

WJ: So my next one came out in March. It is called Accidentally Engaged. Aren’t you excited already?

GJ: Yes. So excited.

WJ: It’s by Farah Heron. It came out from Forever Press. Here are just some keywords that I will throw at you. Fake engagement. Sourdough starter. Baking competition. And the description of the romantic hero is “the body of Captain America, a delicious British accent, and lives right across the hall.

GJ: Oh, fantastic. Neighbors. Great.

WJ: I feel like that’s, that’s everything that I needed to know to want to read this book. When I got to sourdough starter… Bread! Yay!

GJ: There’s another baking competition romance novel coming out this year, so I should read them as like companion novels.

WJ: Ooh, which one is that?

GJ: Did you read Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall?

WJ: Not yet. My Libby app keeps saying that my hold will come in soon. So I’m excited but not yet.

GJ: Well, anyway, Alexis Hall has another book coming out this year called Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake, and I believe it’s set at a baking competition.

WJ: Yeah, we should do a pairing.

GJ: Oh, man, that sounds wonderful.

WJ: What’s your next one?

GJ: Okay, my next one is gonna be a bit of a change in tone. It’s called Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon, coming out in May from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. I don’t know too much about this book, but I know it’s about a young Black girl who flees from an abusive cult when she’s pregnant with twins. So perhaps not your thing, Whiskey Jenny. Genre wise, I think it’s kind of magic realismy, kind of SF-y, kind of horror-y, but I think the world of this author, I’ve read some of their past work, and I’m excited that they have a new novel out. But definitely all the trigger warnings for pretty much everything that’s scary and terrible about cults. And then in a cheerier mode, Black Water Sister by Zen Cho, which is out in May from Ace. A girl called Jess moves back to Malaysia, where she hasn’t lived since she was very small, and when she’s there, she starts hearing like the voice of her dead grandmother, and her dead grandmother is like, All right, I need you to get revenge on this gang boss. And she’s like, What? No!

WJ: Oh, that sounds great. I love ghosts.

GJ: Yeah, exactly. So the grandmother’s like, Yeah, he’s offended a god and I’m dead, so you’re gonna have to do it. She’s like, but I don’t want to!

WJ: That’s amazing. Nothing for it! You’re gonna have to to do it! I am immaterial.

GJ: As you know, this podcast is a big fan of Zen Cho. So I mean, this is a book from her that’s set I think in like our world, but with ghosts, which is a new fun thing for Zen Cho, for her novels, so yeah, I’m really excited about it.

WJ: So my next one is coming out in March from Mulholland. It’s called Lightseekers. It’s by Femi Kayode. At least I think that’s how you pronounce it. I couldn’t confirm online, so apologies if it’s wrong. It is set in Nigeria. I believe the author used to be a professor of psychology, and our detective is a professor of psychology. So I’m excited for that conceit. I love when it’s not– I mean, I love a private eye. I guess I like when it’s not a police detective.

GJ: People with jobs!

WJ: Yeah, people with jobs investigating a civilian investigator, I think is really interesting. He is called down to a, I think, small town in the south of Nigeria, I believe, where there was in the past a murder of three university students. But the case is not quite as cold as they thought, I think was one of the words in the brief.

GJ: Fantastic.

WJ: Yeah, one of those “the past and secrets haunt us” books. Those cold cases. They never, ever stop reverberating in the present, do they?

GJ: That sounds wonderful. I have really enjoyed reading like mystery novels set in non-Western countries, and it is part of my mystery novel exploring remit to find more books like that. So that sounds great for me as well.

WJ: And let me know when you find them, because I’m exploring as well.

GJ: I will, I definitely will!

WJ: We’ll explore together. What are your next two?

GJ: Okay, so my next two! My first one is Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace, coming out in May from Saga Press. So she wrote Archivist Wasp, which I loved, and she writes stories that are very friendship-forward. She writes a lot of stories with relationships that are not romances, which is like a nice change of pace, though I love romances, too, as we all know. So Firebreak is set in a very like dystopian corporation-controlled future, and this girl Mallory discovers that the company has created like super soldiers, and she wants to save them. But that means setting herself in opposition to this like world-owning corporation. I think this book sounds like Ready Player One, except it doesn’t suck and actually has things to say about capitalism.

WJ: Ooh, burn!

GJ: So, Ready Player One, but good.

Unknown Speaker

Sounds great.

GJ: And then my next one is sort of a mystery, but with magic. It’s called The Library of the Dead by TL Huchu, coming out in June 2021 from Tor. It’s about a girl named Ropa, who’s a ghost talker, so her job is she talks to the ghosts of Edinburgh and like carries their messages back to the living. She uses a combination of Scottish and Zimbabwean magic, which sounds really fun, and then she finds out that kids are going missing on her turf, so she has to investigate.

WJ: Holy smokes, that sounds cool.

GJ: Doesn’t that sound great? There’s like a magic library. She like makes a best friend. It sounds like so much fun and so up my alley.

WJ: Yay, friends.

GJ: Yay, friendship! Yay, magic library too. There’s so much about this that I’m excited for. What’s your next one?

WJ: My penultimate pick is going out in April from Berkeley. It is called Dial A for Aunties. It’s by Jessie Q. Sutento, and friend of the pod Ashley was the one who turned me on to this book? It’s described as both a romcom and a murder mystery, and I think our protagonist accidentally killed her date or something. You know how that happens! And then her aunties have to be called in to help her clean up. And it just sounds great.

GJ: It sounds so fun. Yeah, I’m excited for this one, too. It sounds like a delight.

WJ: So thank you, Ashley, for telling us about it.

GJ: Oh, and as always, Ashley has great book recommendations.

WJ: As always, indeed. What is your penultimate two?

GJ: No, my ultimate two!

WJ: Oh, no, you’re already on ultimate?

GJ: Yeah, because…

WJ: Oh, yeah, you went first. Oh, boy. I’m sad it’s over.

GJ: Okay, so my second to last one is kind of cheating, because I have in fact, already read it. But it’s The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo, out in June from Tor. I am cheating by including this because I have already read it, but I’m so excited for this book to come out. I’m so excited for it. It is a retelling of The Great Gatsby from the point of view of a queer Vietnamese American Jordan Baker. And there’s like a soupcon of magic involved. And it’s so good. It’s so good. I read it, and I was like, well, so much for The Great Gatsby, it’s been superseded, we don’t have to care about it anymore. The writing was beautiful. The magic was like just creepy enough. It felt very good for the end of a pandemic because it’s like roaring 20s, and everyone’s at parties drinking champagne, and it just made me feel very yearny for parties. And I don’t even like parties that much. So really a true feat by the author. It’s just so good. Everyone should preorder it. It is fantastic. It’s going to be one of my top probably three books of the year. I’m prepared to say that already.

WJ: Wow, that sounds really fun. So it’s still set in the 1920s? Interesting.

GJ: Yeah, it’s a pretty close retelling of The Great Gatsby. But the point of view is different, obviously, which makes a big difference, and then there is magic, so I liked it a lot. A lot. A lot. A lot.

WJ: That sounds really fun.

GJ: Yeah. Okay, and then my last one is The Jasmine Throne, by Tasha Suri, coming out in June from Orbit. Tasha Suri writes these secondary world fantasy novels, which is not my favorite subgenre, but she makes them so good and like so easy to get into. And they’re also very romance inflected, so like they are fantasy novels, but the romance is typically very important to the books. And this one is the first in a new series by her, and it’s about a princess who has been imprisoned by her horrible dictator brother. Yeah, and the princess’s maidservant, who I think uses illegal magic. And I think what happens is they go on a mission to topple the empire whilst pining for each other. Sounds wonderful! Yeah, so that’s, that’s my last one. And I’m, I’m just unbelievably excited for it.

WJ: I’m so sorry. I think you’ve done this a million times before. But can you remind me what secondary world means again?

GJ: Yes, it means it takes place in a fictional fantasy world that’s not our world.

WJ: Okay. Just a totally different world.

GJ: Just a totally different, made-up world, yeah.

WJ: Like Mars.

GJ: Nope. Mars is real.

WJ: Are you sure? Have you ever been there?

GJ: As my little nephew would say, There’s a rover there named Curiosity. He liked Mars so much, he flew up there to take pictures for us.

WJ: That is so cute. Oh my God, you just killed me. Yep, that’s what happened. Accurate!

GJ: What is your last book?

WJ: My last book comes out in August. But that’s still summer, so I’m counting it, and I will not be taking any further questions. It comes out from Soho Press. It is by friend of the pod Robert Repino. It’s called Malefactor. It’s the final in the War with No Name trilogy, which started with Mort(e). It’s the sci fi he wrote about animals getting sentient, larger and sentience and going to war with the humans. This is the conclusion of the trilogy. I believe it takes place after the war and their rebuilding efforts, but then wolves. I don’t know much else, but I am very excited for, you know, the return of our beloved characters.

GJ: Yeah, just see how it all wraps up.

WJ: Yeah. Third one, Return of the King. I mean!

GJ: Yeah, a lot riding on it.

WJ: And also beavers. I’m really excited for the beavers to return.

GJ: So excited for the return of the beavers. We love the beavers.

WJ: So yeah. Malefactor! And I’m also really excited, his covers have all had really– They’ve just been like, one really bold color and black and white, sort of like silhouettes of an animal. So I’m really excited to see the cover of Malefactor.

GJ: Definitely. I love the cover designs for these books.

WJ: They’re really gorgeous. Yeah.

GJ: And it must have been a very tricky book to do the initial cover design for. It seems like it’d be very hard to represent graphically, and I just think they nailed it.

WJ: Absolutely. Yeah. The themes and the concepts and stuff are very wide ranging and to represent all that in like nine by twelve.

GJ: Crushed it. Is nine by twelve the size that you think books are?

WJ: Could be! No. I’m just bad at numbers.

GJ: I thought you might have just like converted to centimeters, and you’re like, down with the imperial system! I’m onto metric now!

WJ: I still do have trouble estimating distances and measurements.

GJ: Oh, God, me too.

WJ: Normally I use eight and a half by eleven as just like my– You know, like, I know how big that piece of paper is. So I measure everything by how big it is in relation to that piece of paper. But you’re right, I went wrong on this. Books are not bigger than that piece of paper. They are smaller.

GJ: This is a books podcast!

WJ: Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

GJ: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pick on you. I apologize.

WJ: No, you did it correctly. Well, can I just say, it’s nice to have things to look forward to in 2020. 2021. It’s 2021.

GJ: It is, and I think there’s so many good books coming out later this year. And I don’t know if it’s just that there’s a lot of books, or if it’s because stuff got pushed back, or what, but there’s like so much stuff I’m looking forward to.

WJ: Yay! Hope!

GJ: Woo! Books!

WJ: I hatened this year Star of the Sea, by Joseph O’Connor. I picked it because it was, a, by an Irish author, and we know Gin Jenny hates just the Irish people in general.

GJ: I don’t. I love the Irish people. Like, I just don’t love your literature. I do love the TV show Derry Girls more than anything.

Did you watch their Bake Off?

No, I haven’t yet. I want to watch it with my sister at sister night.

Well, I recommend it. It was great.

Did you see that–I’m so sorry to stan Derry Girls–but did you see that tweet that was like, Derry Girls accurately represents the five types of teenage girls: horny, pretentious, lesbian, feral and wee English lad.

WJ: Boy, that’s a good tweet.

GJ: Anyway, despite my love of Derry Girls, it’s true that I do not love Irish books at all.

WJ: So that was one of the reasons I picked it. It also, I thought from the description that it was going to be like an ensemble story, you know, not multigenerational family, but multiple perspectives and narratives all tied together. On the opposite side, since it is 2021, I didn’t want to go full sadist. So it was set on a ship, which I thought would be interesting for both of us. And there was a murder, so there was interesting plot stuff happening. So it’s set in the 1840s on a ship called Star of the Sea that is going from Ireland to New York, and it takes place over the course of the 25 days of the voyage, and there’s a murder. I did not realize this before starting it, but it’s also sort of– not epistolary, but–

GJ: It’s set up as if it’s a book that one of the characters is writing.

WJ: Yes, thank you. Some, like, found documents thrown in. So what did you think of it?

GJ: I would say overall, it could have been worse. I feel like my response to it was exactly where you were aiming, Whiskey Jenny, like, the precision of a master darts player. In that, like, it wasn’t the most brutal chore. I didn’t hate it the way I really hated that last Irish book. And I didn’t resent it the way I resented Island at the Edge of Night or whatever that one was called. But it was not fun to read, and I didn’t like anyone in it, and yet I was really mad that things went badly for all the characters. iI think I would have actually preferred the book I thought I was getting, which was about all the different people on the famine ship?

WJ: Oh, absolutely.

GJ: So I thought it would be about a bunch of different characters, and it was really only about like a very small group of characters. A lot of it takes place not on the famine ship, which is kind of disappointing. But the magic of ships worked though! I think we learned that setting the story onboard a ship is a big offset to the book elements I hate, because all the stuff that happened on the ship, I was like, really into.

WJ: Completely agree with everything, except for the compliment about me being like a good darts player, because when I did not nail with me loving it. I feel like I had the same reaction. In particular. I also thought we were getting a different book. I thought it was gonna be a lot more stories. And as you said, it’s like three people.

GJ: Right. And a lot of it’s just about their past. It’s like not about the ship.

WJ: Yeah, exactly. I needed more about the daily life on the ship, and I needed more points of view. In particular, more points of view in steerage!

GJ: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I thought it was gonna be like an Upstairs/Downstairs kind of book.

WJ: But on a boat! Why can’t we have that book! That book sounds great! Let’s do that!

GJ: Actually, we should have that as a like a show.

WJ: What do you mean?

GJ: That should be like a miniseries!

WJ: Oh, a TV show? Okay. Yeah. I thought you meant like, WE should have that as a show!

GJ: No, like a, like an ITV series.

WJ: That would be great. I would love that.

GJ: It’s like a month-long sea voyage. And we get to know everyone and all their lives and stuff. That’d be so fun.

WJ: Yes. So I completely agree: All this stuff on the ship was the most interesting. Just like the small details of that life, I think, when they’re first introducing one of the main characters, Pyatt?

GJ: Pius!

WJ: Anyway, sorry, yeah, Pius! One of the things that they say is weird about him is you like really, really, really had to press him to give an opinion on the fiddle players on board, which is just such a sweet detail of like, that’s what everyone’s talking about. But otherwise, it picks the wrong stories to tell, to me, and it told those stories from the wrong point of view as well. Not wrong! Not the one that I would have picked. I also had no idea that it had this conceit built around it that it’s written by one of the passengers. And I don’t think I liked that concept.

GJ: Oh, I like that concept a lot. That’s the type of thing I tend to like.

WJ: I normally do really enjoy epistolary stuff. But I had a hard time getting on board with this, because the whole time I was just sort of like, Who the fuck is this guy telling me this? And why do I care about him? And how do you know any of it? Because most of it isn’t found documents! Most of it is you writing about points of view that you wouldn’t have known, and I just got really mad at him.

GJ: I think that the reason that I was feeling more charitably towards it is that some of the chapters were quite short. And as you recall, one of my issues with the goddamn last book is there were no chapter breaks. I think just from a reading perspective, I was like, Oh, good a break! Because the chapters are pretty short, and not to be really shallow, but it’s 2021. I’m very, very old. And like, that was a blessing unto me.

WJ: I like that that’s what you liked about it. I just think it’s so weird that on this ship, if you are– I mean, like separating the horrific classism and conditions down in steerage, if you are in first class, there’s only 15 of you, and you’re just like expected to hang out and eat dinner together. That’s weird! Like if you had to hang out with your passengers on a plane, these randos, for like a month! It’s just so weird! And I think that’s such a more interesting story about like, how do you get along with these people for a month? You don’t know them! You have to eat dinner with them every night!

GJ: I so agree. Whenever I read about the British in India, in colonial India, I feel like this comes up a lot, because they had to eat dinner with the same like 10 people constantly. And if you didn’t like them, it was like, too bad.

WJ: Too bad! You got to keep hanging out with them!

GJ: Not only did you have to keep hanging out with the same small group of people, but because they were like, well, we don’t want to like let India influence us in any way, so they were really really rigid about like class distinctions. So you basically had to sit next to the same people at dinner every time, because your rank never changed. So you were just stuck with your, like, neighbor to the left and your neighbor to the right at every dinner. Sounds awful.

WJ: It sounds awful. Yeah, I mean, not any more awful than being in steerage, but yeah, awful!

GJ: No, a very different kind of awful. And I think that when they did have scenes with them all having dinner together, it was like comically terrible, and I enjoyed that.

WJ: It was a lot more like soap opera-y than I was expecting. There were so many — where it was like — oh, well, this is a spoiler, but: Actually, they’re siblings! Or actually, the person she married was your half brother who was estranged! I think part of the reason that I didn’t love it as much as I thought I would is because I did read it in this the year of our Lord 2021. And so I was kind of putting a lot of stuff on it. Like two years ago, I probably would been like, sure that was a fine romp. This year. I was like, I don’t have time for this. I’m not into this, like this, classism, no. It has a bunch of racist stuff in it. You know, the characters are racist in the way that characters from that time period were racist. I just don’t want to read that. And then I just feel like Mary was the actual main character, and she got so few actual point of view chapters. One of the ones from her point of view was a letter from her husband, so it wasn’t even her voice. So then I just got myself into this feminist rage. And then I was so pissed at it, which is a weird position  I was pissed that it was so soapy, because if a woman had written this book, it would been like, Oh, it’s so overdramatic, and look at women with their feelings again, but no, no, a man wrote it, so it’s literary. So I recognize that a lot of that is coming from me, but also not.

GJ: Yeah, I was gonna say, you’re actually touching on a lot of things that I genuinely had a problem with. I think that, in response to what you’re saying about Mary Duane, there was a lot of this sort of like, good women having things done to them by wicked, irresponsible men, which got really old.

WJ: Yeah, like constantly!

GJ: Constantly. Yeah. And then the voices that are heard are mainly the voices of men. So the women are backburnered in a way that I found exhausting. Also, hilariously, they described a woman as coltish at one point, and I was so excited and angry for you.

WJ: Oh, my God. I didn’t– I totally missed that! Maybe I was like already in a rage blindness. It’s the kind of book that describes women as coltish.

GJ: Yeah, and it did. So.

WJ: To your point, that it’s mostly told from the point of view of men who are doing these things to women, it’s rich men, also, who are doing these things to women, for the most part.

GJ: Yeah, I didn’t like the main poor man either.

WJ: I mean, no, he’s awful too!

GJ: Well, and this went to something that I find tiring about Irish literature in general, like Pius Mulvey does shitty things to be shitty. And I didn’t begin liking him more when he started being kinder because then he was pitiful, and I felt like the book was very much in that mode of like the “nasty, brutish, and short” thing of human life, which is fine. It’s not my personal cup of tea, and it does tend to be what I don’t like about Irish literature. Sorry, Ireland. So yeah, I mean, you nailed it with that.

WJ: Yeah. But that’s not what I like about Irish literature. So I did not nail it for me. I think you hit the nail on the head. I think the entire thing is joyless. Nothing good can come from humanity, seems to be the premise of this book.

GJ: Yes. Agreed. Also, I want to go back to something you were saying earlier. This is not a hatening thing; I think this is just bad craft. I was mad that the author chose to use racist slurs in what felt to me like very unnecessary ways. Like, I was glad that it didn’t gloss over the fact that a lot of English money at this time came from slavery in the Americas. But there are several occasions where racist slurs are used, like including the N word several times–

WJ: Uncensored. Like, printed out.

GJ: Yeah, not starred out. Right. And I don’t think the author really was bothering to grapple with the weight and violence of that word, and I think he was using it more as stage setting. Like: these are the times and you know it because they’re using this word, which I really don’t like, and I think happens a lot in white writers writing historical fiction, especially white non-American writers writing historical fiction. And although it is period-typical, he’s curating what goes in and what stays out. Like he mentions in his author’s note that he’s made up some US adoption law to make it more racist. But then there’s another place where a character is gay, and the narrator’s like, that’s fine, though. So like choices are being made. And I think the choice to put the N word in at least three times without having any characters of color is uncool. And I really thought he shouldn’t have done it, and I thought it was bad craft.

WJ: Yeah, no, completely agreed. I glossed over that in my rant, and I shouldn’t have.

GJ: No, No, you didn’t!

WJ: Yeah, I think this is emblematic, two of my notes back to back: So we got a scene set in Whitechapel. So my note says, “Well, I do appreciate that this is not just portraying London as full of white people, I guess.” Which was me trying to find the silver lining in the way that characters of other nationalities were being referred to in that section. And then right after that, I have a sarcastic note, which says, “Oh, good. Now there’s blackface.” So I think you’re completely right. It’s just stage setting, and it’s not at all grappled with. You nailed it. I also think that the violence of the famine and that suffering was sensationalized? I think that that was another type of horror and trauma that got not grappled with, but just treated as set dressing.

GJ: Especially with, very early on, there’s a part where it’s clear that a father has killed his child, and then himself. And I think that is meant as, again, stage setting, to say like, this is how horrible the famine is. And I don’t want to make it sound like the famine wasn’t that horrible because it clearly was! It was manmade, and it was really, really horrible.

WJ: Yeah, exactly. I’m not saying that the descriptions were inaccurate. I’m saying that they seemed to revel in the horror of it a bit too much for my liking.

GJ: Yeah, totally. That said, I mean, I don’t want to be like completely negative. At times I thought the writing was quite lovely, and at other times, I thought it was very funny. Like there’s a part where it’s saying that a character doesn’t fight fair, and it says, “The Marquess of Queensberry, he was not. But as admirers of another flamboyant Irishman will know, neither was the Marquess of Queensberry.” That’s a good Oscar Wilde joke. I appreciated it.

WJ: I totally missed that. Can I go back? You said that there was a gay character, and I think I missed that as well. Who was that?

GJ:  It just comes up barely, barely, barely again, at the end, one of the sons of David and his wife, Laura. At the end, the narrator, who’s the kids’ stepfather, mentions he thinks that one of the boys, now an adult, prefers the company of men.

WJ: Oh, I missed that too. As you say, choices being made. I want to go back to your point, though, about sometimes the writing being good. Because, yeah, I think I was mostly just sort of faintly annoyed the whole time reading this, followed by periods of being extremely annoyed, and then I’d go back to just being faintly annoyed. But then every once in a while, there was a sentence that would just like, knock me on my ass. I did really appreciate that. So he’s talking about his brother’s faith, basically. And Pius is saying, is denouncing like, all faith as a lie, basically. But just the way he phrased it, I thought was beautiful, because he says that his brother “is translating that fact,” meaning the fact of like, existence, “translating that fact into a sententious fiction because he lacked the courage to read it in the original.” I just really liked that like, lies are translated versions of the original was just such an interesting concept. So yeah, so every once in a while, there would be this phrase or this concept that I would like sit there with for a while.

GJ: Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, the writing was really good. I mean, I think, overall, this book is probably as close to being something I might enjoy as any book of this type could be.

WJ: Can I… I have some plot questions.

GJ: Okay. I mean, I’ll really give it my all. I finished reading this quite shortly before podcast recording. So like… I think I maybe could do it. So: Spoilers from now.

WJ: Who killed David? The writer?

GJ: The writer. Yes.

WJ: The writer.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Episode 146 – 2021 Book Preview and The Hatening Begins appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 122

I say this in the podcast, but please accept content warnings for our discussion of Trust Exercise: The book includes underage sex, including statutory rape, and sexual predation by a teacher, and we discuss all of those things.

Here are the time signatures if you want to skip around.

1:18 – What we’re reading
8:25 – What we’re cooking/etaing
13:19 – Shelf review!
29:37 – Trust Exercise, Susan Choi
45:15 – What we’re reading next time!

What we talked about:

Furious Hours, Casey Cep
Kind Hearts and Coronets (movie!)
A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (musical!)
Leverage
How to Belong with a Billionaire, Alexis Hall
Together: Our Community Cookbook, by the Hubb Community Kitchen, with a foreword by HRH The Duchess of Sussex
Shakespeare the Thinker, A. D. Nuttall
The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare
10 Things I Hate About You
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, William Shakespeare
The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty
Gemsigns, Stephanie Saulter
Binary, Stephanie Saulter
Regeneration, Stephanie Saulter
Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Lee Masters
Six Wives, David Starkey
Walking Across Egypt, Clyde Edgerton
The Black House, Peter May
the podcast Zan Romanoff was on!
Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz
Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat, Kate Leth and Brittney Williams
Anyone Comics (genuinely the best comics shop in Brooklyn)
Hawkeye, Matt Fraction and David Aja
Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religion in American History, Philip Jenkins
Acute Reactions, Ruby Lang
Hard Knocks, Ruby Lang
Clean Breaks, Ruby Lang
Playing House, Ruby Lang
Playing House the TV show
Leverage again
Trust Exercise, Susan Choi
That They May Face the Rising Sun, John McGahern (US title By the Lake)

Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. 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 much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry

Transcript

GIN JENNY: Welcome back to the Reading the End Bookcast with the demographically similar Jennys. Wait, is that how I normally start?

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah.

GIN JENNY: OK, it sounds weird. I’m so sorry.

WHISKEY JENNY: You got it. You nailed it

GIN JENNY: It’s been so long, I don’t even remember. [LAUGHTER] What are words?

GIN JENNY: Welcome back to the Reading the End Bookcast with the demographically similar Jennys. I’m Gin Jenny.

WHISKEY JENNY: And I’m Whiskey Jenny.

GIN JENNY: And we are here again to talk about books and literary happenings. On today’s podcast, we’re going to talk about what we are reading and eating-slash-cooking. We enjoyed our last shelf review so much that we’re doing another little shelf review this time. And then we’re going to launch the Hatening with a book I really suspect Whiskey Jenny loathed, Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi. Don’t spoil it for me. I’m looking forward to finding out.

WHISKEY JENNY: OK. I won’t.

GIN JENNY: But before we get into all that, Whiskey Jenny, what are you reading?

WHISKEY JENNY: I am reading Furious Hours, by Casey Cep, which is a true crime that my book club picked. We already had book club about it, so I’m clearly behind.

It is about a trial that Harper Lee was attending and maybe going to write about. So the beginning is sort of the crime. And then the middle part is the trial. And then apparently the last part, which I’ve not gotten to yet, is going to be about Harper Lee trying to write about it.

And so far it is absolutely bananas. And I’m enjoying it so far. It’s insane, this crime. And it is a lot about insurance, and there’s so much about the history of insurance. And you wouldn’t think that sounded interesting, but I could have read 100 more pages about insurance. It was so interesting.

GIN JENNY: Well, I am very surprised. When you say it’s crazy, do you mean the details of the crime itself, or the investigation, or both?

WHISKEY JENNY: I would say the details of the crime itself are insane. This guy keeps murdering people [LAUGHTER] for the insurance money, and they can’t prove it or stop him.

GIN JENNY: Oh my God.

WHISKEY JENNY: He murdered five of his family members.

GIN JENNY: Oh my God!

WHISKEY JENNY: One after the other. And by the time two happen, everybody knows it’s him, but they just can’t prove it or stop it or anything! [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: Oh my God! That is bananas!

WHISKEY JENNY: It was in the ‘70s. He just kept killing people. It was crazy.

GIN JENNY: Oh my God!

WHISKEY JENNY: It was crazy. Well so the end, the actual trial is that then, at the funeral of his final victim, he is murdered. In front of 300 people, somebody shoots him in the head.

GIN JENNY: [GASP]

WHISKEY JENNY: Because that person was close to the final victim. I was her, I want to say, uncle or something. OK. And he is so fed up that he kills the dude, the serial murderer.

GIN JENNY: Wow.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, right? Wow.

WHISKEY JENNY: It was bananas.

GIN JENNY: This has been a lot of information. Did you ever see the old, old movie Kind Hearts and Coronets?

WHISKEY JENNY: Did I not see that? Oh wait, yes, no, I have not. [LAUGHTER] I’ve seen the musical that they made based on it.

GIN JENNY: Yes, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, which is also excellent.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yes.

GIN JENNY: Both of them are about this guy who’s eighth, I think, in line to inherit a noble title, like the Earl of something. And he finds this out, and he gets mad because the family disinherited his mother. So he just starts killing all the other family members so that he can inherit the earldom, or whatever. And in both incarnations it is so much fun and so delightful.

I really wouldn’t have thought someone could murder a high number of their relatives without getting caught, as this guy does in the movie.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah.

GIN JENNY: And he gets all the insurance money? He keeps collecting the payouts?

WHISKEY JENNY: Yes.

GIN JENNY: Wow.

WHISKEY JENNY: Eventually they start challenging it, but I think he still—and he would have multiple policies on people.

GIN JENNY: Gosh.

WHISKEY JENNY: So some of them would pay to be like, it’s cheaper than you going after me with your lawyer. Because then he would get a lawyer and be like, look, I was not indicted. You can’t— [LAUGHTER] Boy, it was crazy.

GIN JENNY: Wow. I learned relatively recently that you can just take out an insurance policy on anyone you want.

WHISKEY JENNY: So yeah, based on the insurance I learned about in this book, that used to be true. And it was a real problem, that people [LAUGHTER] kept taking out insurance on people and then murdering them. [LAUGHTER] So let’s change that. And also, structural racism is everywhere, but I was surprised to learn that in the recent past, there would be different rates for white people and black people for insurance. They would have to pay more and get less of a payout, just because the world is racist.

GIN JENNY: I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s still true.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yes. Also yes. Insurance, man. Now really I just want to read a book about insurance now, which is a sentence that I never thought I would say. [LAUGHTER] Also, insurance is a scam that I—along with banks and airlines, insurance is on my list. [LAUGHTER] Just so we’re clear.

What are you reading right now? Woo, we covered a lot of ground. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: Yes, we did. I just had a lot of follow up questions. So one of my favorite romance authors, Alexis Hall, did a queer redo of the Fifty Shades of Gray series, which I think is a very fascinating case study, in terms of the progression from Twilight to Fifty Shades of Gray to this. But anyway, so he wrote these books. And they’re not—well, I don’t know how closely they adhere to the Fifty Shades of Gray books, because I have not read Fifty Shades of Gray. But it’s my understanding that it was his notion to do a less horrifying redo of that series.

WHISKEY JENNY: Mm-hmm.

GIN JENNY: And what I have learned while reading this series is that I don’t really enjoy this relationship in any of its iterations. [LAUGHTER] Even when someone like Alexis Hall is writing them, who I think is very smart about power dynamics in general.

So yeah, I read the first two. And I guess they were enjoyable to read, but I just felt so weird about the relationship itself. It was tough. It was tough to support. And anyway, the third one is out now, How to Belong with a Billionaire, and I’m reading that to round out the series. I don’t super think that Alexis Hall can bring me back around on these guys, but we’ll see.

WHISKEY JENNY: I have several questions.

GIN JENNY: Hit me.

WHISKEY JENNY: What’s the deal in this version?

GIN JENNY: That’s a great question. Because I read the first two kind of a while ago. I think it’s just that the rich guy is very rich and the point of view character is a student. I don’t remember how—I know the rich guy pays for a lot of stuff, and I felt really uncomfortable about it. I don’t remember how much—because in Fifty Shades of Gray isn’t there a contract or something?

WHISKEY JENNY: I believe so, yeah.

GIN JENNY: I don’t remember if that happens in this series. I think it maybe does, but I don’t remember how formalized it is. I mean, as a mark of how little I trust billionaires and how little I enjoy reading about them, the billionaire character gives the point of view character a nice new coat, and that is like—

WHISKEY JENNY: Oh.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, yeah exactly! I love it when people give people coats. I love it! It’s my favorite. And even that didn’t bring me around. I don’t know, Whiskey Jenny.

WHISKEY JENNY: Why are you still reading it then?

GIN JENNY: I think because I like this author. And I feel like I’ve read the first two, so I might as well read the third one. I think my time as a TV show finisher is impacting other areas of my life possibly.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, I’m really surprised. You’re usually such a—

GIN JENNY: I guess because I keep hoping it’ll turn around and I’ll be into it again.

WHISKEY JENNY: OK.

GIN JENNY: And when I say again, I have never been into it, so I’m not sure what I’m hoping for. [LAUGHTER]

WHISKEY JENNY: Well that’s very optimistic and beautifully hopeful of you.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, we’ll see.

WHISKEY JENNY: It’s modern day, right?

GIN JENNY: Yeah, yeah. It’s modern day. I think the main character, Arden, I think is at Oxford when the book starts, or something.

WHISKEY JENNY: Oh yeah, what are their names?

GIN JENNY: OK, so their names are Arden and Caspian.

WHISKEY JENNY: Which one is which?

GIN JENNY: The one that begins with an A is the one that begins with an A.

WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, right, right, right. Got it.

GIN JENNY: Sorry, I just couldn’t remember her name. Anastasia.

WHISKEY JENNY: Anastasia and Christian.

GIN JENNY: And Christian.

WHISKEY JENNY: So it’s Arden and Caspian. Oh, that’s sort of Oxfordian. Interesting.

GIN JENNY: Sure, yeah. Arden St. Ives is his name.

WHISKEY JENNY: Interesting. Oh, I hate it.

GIN JENNY: Well, so for something else-ing this time, Whiskey Jenny, you chose to talk about what we are cooking slash eating. So why don’t you tell the people your thing first? Because as usual, mine is ridiculous.

WHISKEY JENNY: Oh no! I shouldn’t have picked it. But I just wanted to talk about my thing, which is that I got some eggplant with my CSA. And I don’t really like eggplants.

GIN JENNY: No, because they’re gross and also frightening looking.

WHISKEY JENNY: Right? And every time someone tells you about how to prepare them, it’s always like, OK, they’re really watery, so you have to start 24 hours early and salt them, and then wave at them with a magic wand, and then they might taste good.

Unless you turn them into baba ganoush, which is what I did, and it was delicious and so easy. And so I made baba ganoush, and then I also made flatbreads to put the baba ganoush on.

GIN JENNY: Wow.

WHISKEY JENNY: And you know what was in the flatbreads? Flour, yogurt, baking powder, and salt. And that was it.

GIN JENNY: Wow.

WHISKEY JENNY: And then you just make it like a pancake, basically. You smush the dough out really thin, and then you put it in the pan, and then you flip it when one side is done.

GIN JENNY: Huh. And it came out good?

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah! It’s delicious! Flatbreads, man. Flatbreads! [LAUGHTER] I feel so lied to by big flatbread. They’re so easy.

GIN JENNY: You are kind of making me want to try it, and I’m not an ambitious woman in the kitchen.

WHISKEY JENNY: I found it incredibly easy. And I also only had vanilla Greek yogurt, and the recipe I was using said that you should not use Greek, and it was still fine. It was completely fine.

GIN JENNY: Would you choose to use vanilla yogurt another time, or would you—?

WHISKEY JENNY: I would not. [LAUGHTER] It was fine, and I put a ton of garlic in the baba ganoush because I like garlic. And thus the garlic overwhelmed the vanilla.

GIN JENNY: And then my other question was, for the baba ganoush, did you have to employ a blender? Like, how smushed did you—how easy was it to smush the eggplant up?

WHISKEY JENNY: I did employ a blender, but you would not have had to. The eggplant at this point was very smushy. So it’s just the eggplant, which you roast in the oven for like an hour—whole. You don’t even have to do anything to it. And then it peels really easy when it comes out, and then it’s nice and mushy. And then you mix it up with maybe some olive oil, but definitely tahini and some lemon juice. I put some parsley and a ton of garlic in there. And it was really tasty.

GIN JENNY: Cool. Way to go. I’m so impressed.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. Give it a try, if ever you have an eggplant.

GIN JENNY: I mean, I hope that won’t happen, because eggplants really freak me out.

WHISKEY JENNY: It would only be if an eggplant is foisted upon you, but now you know what to do with it. [LAUGHTER] Well, I can send you the official recipe. The one I used it from the cookbook that Meghan Markle sponsored of the post-Grenfell Towers fire community kitchen.

GIN JENNY: Oh, that’s wonderful.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. It’s a really lovely cookbook. So what are you eating slash cooking right now?

GIN JENNY: This is a little silly. So you know the way that you decide how to make things based on what your CSA delivers unto you?

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s great. I don’t have to make any decisions.

GIN JENNY: So the way that I decide how to eat my food is based on what extremely random ingredients I’ve ended up with, because I don’t like wasting food. So whatever is in my house, I’m like, how can I repurpose this to make it into more kinds of meals?

When I make my cheese fries, I sometimes buy ranch dressing from a restaurant. But it’s kind of expensive. It’s like $8 for a pint. But it’s very good, because it’s restaurant ranch. But I was trying the Hidden Valley Ranch spice mix, and I mixed it with sour cream, and it was fine. But it wasn’t great. And I really wanted some—I’d had a hard week, and I really wanted some legit ranch dressing.

And what I figured out is that if I bought just a whole bunch of russet potatoes, I could use the current sour creamy ranch dressing stuff as stuffing for stuffed potatoes, along with potatoes and cheese and other ingredients that I already had. So I just made a crap ton of stuff potatoes, and I froze them in batches. And I haven’t made stuffed potatoes in a while, but they are quite tasty, and they’re a very pleasant accompaniment to whatever else I happen to be eating for dinner.

WHISKEY JENNY: I’ve got to say, the story really took a turn. I thought it was going to end up with some sort of ranch miracle. But no, it was a potato miracle.

GIN JENNY: It was a potato miracle. I used my medium mixy ranch stuff in stuffed potatoes.

WHISKEY JENNY: I also love using things up. And my mom makes fun of me now, what joy I get when I finish things in the fridge. But I don’t like wasting things either, and I feel so good about myself when I use something up. [LAUGHTER] Like, yes, I did it.

GIN JENNY: Yeah. And especially when I—like recently, for some reason that I don’t remember, I wasn’t that hungry, but I nevertheless ordered Mexican on Uber Eats. And they had a thing where if you ordered over $20 worth of food, you got free delivery. This wasn’t worth it, but I ordered a thing that was a sampler, and it was for two people. And I have made it into like four meals by adding things that I had in my house. And I’m just really, really, really great about myself.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah! Great job. Great job. Where are we on the ranch front, though?

GIN JENNY: I did this so that I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about wasting the ranch that I had made out of the spice mix and my sour cream.

WHISKEY JENNY: But next time you want ranch dressing, what are you going to do?

GIN JENNY: I’m going to buy it. It’s just better.

WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, you’re just going to keep buying it from the place.

GIN JENNY: I am. Because I’ve thought about it a lot. And I don’t always buy it, but if I have money and I feel that I’ve earned it in some way, it’s a treat. And then if either those conditions does not obtain, then I’m fine having my cheese fries with spicy ketchup, which is also very delicious.

WHISKEY JENNY: Well, there you go.

So we so enjoyed the shelf review that we did last time that we’re doing it again. And we might do it again in the future. Who can say?

GIN JENNY: Yeah. So if you have any ideas for things you’d like to know about the books that we have in our homes, hit us up and let us know.

WHISKEY JENNY: So the way we are attacking it this time—attacking it. That’s very violent. The way we are gently approaching it this time is we have each picked several books for the following two questions. The first question is, what books have been on your to be read shelf for the longest? And the second question is, what books that you already owned have you most recently read?

So do you want to start with what book you have owned the longest?

GIN JENNY: Yes. So I have a couple. But my first one, when I got my first job in publishing, I bought myself Shakespeare the Thinker, by A.D. Nuttall, as a prize. Because I had read several books by this author. He was a scholar. And my plan was—because at this time, I was in a hiatus from a reading project I was doing where I was going to read all the plays of Shakespeare in the order that he wrote them. And my plan was that when I had done that, I would then read Shakespeare the Thinker and I would really get a lot out of it, because I would have read all of Shakespeare’s plays in the order that he wrote them.

The problem is I went on hiatus from this Shakespeare reading project because I couldn’t get through The Taming of the Shrew, as a feminist. And that was in, probably—I don’t know. I assume it was during the Obama administration. And it was just a simpler time. And I have not gotten to a point where I’m more excited about reading Taming of the Shrew. So my project is kind of on indefinite hiatus. So Shakespeare the Thinker is just sitting on my shelves.

I’m sure I’m going to love it. But I just had this order of events planned out in my mind, and I’m having a hard time straying from that plan.

WHISKEY JENNY: Let me ask you this. What if instead of reading Taming of the Shrew, you watched 10 Things I Hate About You?

GIN JENNY: That’s a great idea. Do you think I can just do that? [LAUGHTER]

WHISKEY JENNY: Yes! You absolutely can. [LAUGHTER] You a thousand percent can. It’s basically the same. And then read whatever play he wrote next.

GIN JENNY: I really like that plan and I might do it.

WHISKEY JENNY: You should totally do that.

GIN JENNY: I thought you were going to say just skip it, and I was going to be like, no, I’m committed to the purity of this project.

WHISKEY JENNY: See, no, you’re just slotting something in there. Yeah.

GIN JENNY: Oh, that’s a brilliant idea. Thank you. Man, you’re a problem solver.

WHISKEY JENNY: Well, let us know how it turns out. What did he write after Taming of the Shrew?

GIN JENNY: My recollection—this was a while ago, but I think that there were several different possible chronologies of his plays.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. I’m just curious if you have a good one also coming up after 10 Things I Hate About You.

GIN JENNY: Wow. The chronology that Wikipedia has is definitely not the one that I was following. [LAUGHTER] Wow, not at all. I think it was the chronology presented by E.K. Chambers in 1930.

WHISKEY JENNY: OK.

GIN JENNY: And if that’s the case, then the next one on my list is Two Gentlemen of Verona.

WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, I don’t know anything about that one.

GIN JENNY: I think it gets quoted in Shakespeare in Love. And I think that’s all the knowledge that I have of it. What about you?

WHISKEY JENNY: So I think one of my oldest ones is The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty.

GIN JENNY: Oh, gosh. OK.

WHISKEY JENNY: And I only say how I obtained this book because I really like it and I think more schools should adopt it. For awards in high school, end of the year awards, they would be sometimes books instead of a dumb trophy. So if you won the science award it would be a sciencey book. And this was the English award.

GIN JENNY: Aw.

WHISKEY JENNY: So I obtained it in high school, and it has a very lovely note from my English teacher in it. And I just feel so bad that I still haven’t read it.

GIN JENNY: Let’s hope she doesn’t listen to this podcast.

WHISKEY JENNY: I don’t believe he does, no. Maybe me or my mom will get a very disappointed correspondence and they’ll want to retract the prize. But yeah, it’s The Optimist’s Daughter. And I’m always like, I should read that. I probably would like some Eudora Welty, you know? And then I don’t.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, I don’t think I would either. I’m not really a Southern fiction gal.

WHISKEY JENNY: I’m totally going to Haten you for Southern fiction next year.

GIN JENNY: Oh, that’s a great idea. That would really work. I really don’t like Southern fiction.

WHISKEY JENNY: Perfect. Great. OK, what’s your next oldest?

GIN JENNY: OK. So my next one, also for a very stupid reason, I haven’t read the third book in Stephanie Saulter’s Gemsigns trilogy. Gemsigns was this book that I absolutely loved, was a very fascinating political science fiction book. And the sequel, Binary, was also excellent. It’s about genetically modified humans chasing after their civil rights, essentially.

The third one is Regeneration, and it’s about mermaid-type people, I believe.

WHISKEY JENNY: Ooh.

GIN JENNY: Yeah. And at first I didn’t want to read it, because I was so sad that once I read it the series would be over. But then time passed, and now I don’t remember the series well enough to read the third one until I read the first two. And I only own the second and third ones, so I have to buy a copy of the first one. And once I do that, I can read all of them.

WHISKEY JENNY: And you can’t just look it up online?

GIN JENNY: I mean, yeah, I could, but it’s not what I’m going to do.

WHISKEY JENNY: Why not?

GIN JENNY: I don’t know. Because I really want to own the first one in hardback.

WHISKEY JENNY: Ah, this is all a ploy for you to obtain the first one! I see. [LAUGHTER] I see!

GIN JENNY: Yes, you found me out.

WHISKEY JENNY: So my next one is Spoon River Anthology.

GIN JENNY: Oh! Yeah, yeah.

WHISKEY JENNY: By Edgar Lee Masters. Yeah. I do not remember when I bought this, but I think it was either very early high school or late middle school. And you know how much I love a small town story, and this is basically one of the classics of the small town ensemble story. But then I read the back, and it’s always like, eh. [LAUGHTER]

I think it’s coinciding with my dislike of suburbia is soul-sucking. I think it’s a suburbia is soul-sucking small town ensemble book, and so those two feelings are at war. And they’ve still not been resolved, because I still have it but I haven’t read it. [LAUGHTER] It’s a mass market paperback, and it was $5.95 when I bought it. Let’s see. It says it is the first Signet Classic printing from 1992.

GIN JENNY: You should get rid of it though.

WHISKEY JENNY: I don’t know that I can yet.

GIN JENNY: All right.

WHISKEY JENNY: But I’ll let you know when I do. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: OK.

WHISKEY JENNY: Or when I read it.

GIN JENNY: My last one is a book that my grandmother gave me and that’s why I don’t want to get rid of it. And she wrote in it. She wrote “to Jenny, love Grammy.” It is Six Wives, by David Starkey. It’s about Henry the VIII’s six wives.

The problem is, between acquiring it and now, I have learned that David Starkey is the worst, and also very sexist. So I don’t want to read his rotten book. But it’s a really pretty book, and my grandmother gave it to me. So I haven’t really resolved those two things within myself.

WHISKEY JENNY: I’m sorry I keep proposing things that you probably already thought of. But what if, instead of living on the TBR shelf, it just moves to the permanent collection shelf, but you just don’t read it?

GIN JENNY: I don’t really have a discrete TBR shelf the way you do.

WHISKEY JENNY: Where do they live?

GIN JENNY: Well, I do have some TBR shelving. But also some of them are just scattered amongst my books, and then when I see them I feel shame.

WHISKEY JENNY: Just scattered amongst like a heathen? [LAUGHTER] I’m totally kidding. That’s an extreme, possibly more organized way to live.

GIN JENNY: I should just get rid of it. It’s just it’s very pretty. It’s got gold.

WHISKEY JENNY: I think you should just put it in the permanent collection.

GIN JENNY: That’s where it is. I’m saying, that’s where it is.

WHISKEY JENNY: But mentally, and no longer think of it as this book that I haven’t read. But think of it as this pretty book that your grandmother gave you that you own and are never going to read.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, but do I want David Starkey to be in my permanent collection? Probably not, because he’s a jerk.

WHISKEY JENNY: Eh.

GIN JENNY: All right, well, I’ll take it under advisement.

OK, should I talk about the most recent thing I read that I already owned? Because I want to tell you, I’m killing it on this New Year’s resolution.

WHISKEY JENNY: Boy, I’m so impressed. I can’t wait to hear about it. I am not. Even though I didn’t make a New Year’s resolution. It’s sort of like a constant New Year’s resolution. But please, go on.

GIN JENNY: Oh, it’s one of those confusing unofficial resolutions?

WHISKEY JENNY: Mhm. One of those. And it’s always there.

GIN JENNY: I for some reason own this book, Walking Across Egypt, by Clyde Edgerton, which is a work of Southern fiction about a little old lady who likes to cook for people, and she’s getting on in years. I read it as part of my New Year’s resolution to read my own books. And it was so boring, and just as I was nearing the end and reminding myself that it’s short, so who cares if it’s boring, it was suddenly very racist. And this is why I don’t read Southern fiction

WHISKEY JENNY: Aw. Shoot.

GIN JENNY: Yeah. I culled it. I think I listed it on PaperbackSwap and it was snapped up immediately. So it’s gone from my life.

WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, great.

GIN JENNY: Yeah. What’s your first one?

WHISKEY JENNY: Are you going in order of most recent read?

GIN JENNY: I don’t think—I don’t remember what I did them in order of.

WHISKEY JENNY: OK. I’ll do it in—mine is most recent read. This first one, I’m not totally sure if it counts, because it was a book that was lent to me, but a while ago.

GIN JENNY: I think it counts.

WHISKEY JENNY: OK. So that one is The Blackhouse, by Peter May, which is a mystery set on a small island in Scotland. So I liked the Scottishness of it, and the small island of it, and the details about how close this part of Scotland is to the Arctic, because I always forget that. It’s really close. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: Yeah.

WHISKEY JENNY: But it really was pretty brutal, I would say. I guess I won’t spoil it, but it did have some twists that I was like, holy smokes. I was not prepared to deal with this. So yeah, that one.

GIN JENNY: Well, I’m glad it’s off your plate.

WHISKEY JENNY: I am, too. I think I might read—it’s a series, and it wins mystery awards and stuff. And I think I might read the next one, because surely that would one also have the same sort of stuff that this one had. So I think I might read the next one. We’ll see.

GIN JENNY: All right. Well, tell me how that goes.

WHISKEY JENNY: There was a lot of things I liked about it. I will. I’ll keep you posted.

GIN JENNY: Well, my next one is an actually pleasing one, because I felt like I should not just be negative. Do you remember very long ago when Zan Romanoff came on this podcast, she recommended this book called Slow Days, Fast Company, by Eve Babitz. And she said it was one of the best books she’s ever read about Los Angeles. Well, I was in San Francisco a while back, and I found a copy of that book at City Lights Bookstore, so I bought it.

And I just read it, and I really liked it. It was indeed very evocative of place, and I thought the writing was really charming and funny and frank, and emotionally resonant. So I liked it a lot. Thanks, Zan Romanoff. It’s many years later, but I appreciate it.

WHISKEY JENNY: Thanks, Zan Romanoff. I’ve heard so much about Eve Babitz, but I’ve never actually read anything by her.

GIN JENNY: Well, it was fun. If you’re ever—I mean, if I ever don’t have lots of other bedside book ideas for when you’re visiting, maybe I’ll put that on your bedside table.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, you know what, I feel like that’s the one thing that we got robbed of in our most recent friendcation, is we were both traveling and there was no opportunity for bedside books.

GIN JENNY: Oh boy, that’s a great point. I was about to be like, we could have brought books. And then I was like, no. That would be crazy.

WHISKEY JENNY: We could have, though. We could have brought one each for the other person. I think we should have. We should institute that as a new policy for future travels.

GIN JENNY: OK. Great idea. Let’s do it.

WHISKEY JENNY: But only one. Otherwise, I know myself, and it’ll be like 8. [LAUGHTER] So we have to make a rule that it’s only one. [LAUGHTER]

Well, my next one is a comic book that we acquired together when we went to—shoot, what was that place called?

GIN JENNY: Anyone Comics?

WHISKEY JENNY: Anyone Comics in Brooklyn on one of your visits here. And this was the time that I told the guy that I liked the normal dude just trying to do stuff-ness of the Matt Fraction Hawkeye series. And so he recommended me several things. And one of them that I just read was Patsy Walker.

GIN JENNY: Aw! I really liked Patsy Walker.

WHISKEY JENNY: Which was such a delight. My goodness, it was so cute. So cute.

GIN JENNY: And can I just say, so I read the first one I think when I was staying with you, and I’ve since read subsequent volumes in the series. And it stays so charming and great and fun.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yay! This is exciting to hear. I can’t wait to read more. She is just trying to go to her job and be a good person. And at the very beginning she stops this guy from robbing an armored truck, and then they become best friends. And it is so great.

GIN JENNY: It is great. It’s an all-ages comic, and it’s just so, so delightful. I really recommend it.

WHISKEY JENNY: Patsy Walker a.k.a. Hellcat.

GIN JENNY: Great choice. Great choice. I think there’s a later one where the trade paperback is called You Can’t Stop Me Meow.

WHISKEY JENNY: Aw. Well, this one is Hooked on a Feline.

GIN JENNY: Oh, nice, nice. So good.

WHISKEY JENNY: So good. What is your next one?

GIN JENNY: My last one for this, I started reading a book my sister gave me a while back called Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religion in American History, by Philip Jenkins, which is about cults. I started reading it and I’m actually in the midst of reading it now. And it’s really interesting, but in addition to being really interesting, when I got down from my shelf and opened it up, I found that there was a gift card to a restaurant that I like inside the book, and I had put it in there and forgot about it.

WHISKEY JENNY: Aw! What a nice surprise!

GIN JENNY: I know! So it’s a double treat for me.

WHISKEY JENNY: Man.

GIN JENNY: Plus cults!

WHISKEY JENNY: That’s amazing.

GIN JENNY: It was incredible. When I was a kid and I used to get money for my birthday, I would on purpose take a $20 bill and hide it somewhere about my room. And then I would let enough time pass that I would forget about it. And then at some time in the future—it was like a nice booby trap. Sometime in the future I would find it and be like, hey! 20 bucks!

WHISKEY JENNY: That—wow. You’re so kind to future you.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, I try to be.

WHISKEY JENNY: Adorable.

GIN JENNY: What’s your last one?

WHISKEY JENNY: So my final one was an ebook. Does that count?

GIN JENNY: Yeah.

WHISKEY JENNY: I have just checked the records, and I purchased it on June 24, 2017. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: OK. Good, good.

WHISKEY JENNY: It was Acute Reactions, by Ruby Lang. And you had alerted us that there was a sale going on of her ebooks. So I bought this one and the—it’s the little series of the doctors.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, so Hard Knocks?

WHISKEY JENNY: Hard Knocks, yup. And Acute Reactions and Clean Breaks. And I read Hard Knocks pretty soon after buying it, because that was the hockey player one, and I was most excited about that one. And then I recently read Acute Reactions, which is the allergist one.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, which is my least favorite. It’s the first one in the series, and I think it’s the weakest one.

WHISKEY JENNY: Oh boy, I’m so relieved to hear you say that, because I did not like it. And I was like, maybe I’m not a Ruby Lang person. But I felt so bad because you love her so much.

GIN JENNY: No, I really loved her more based on—I mean, Hard Knocks I really liked. I liked how pissed off the heroine was in Hard Knocks. And I also read, she has a new novella out called Playing House, which is about, like—oh gosh, what are the people? They’re not urban planners, but they’re something like urban planners. And they’re both real nerds about architecture and stuff, and they go to home viewings together. It’s really charming.

WHISKEY JENNY: Speaking of Playing House, you should watch Playing House.

GIN JENNY: OK. I will. I will. I will, I will.

WHISKEY JENNY: [LAUGHTER] You’re so tired of me saying that. I’ll stop.

GIN JENNY: No, I know that I need to do it.

WHISKEY JENNY: It’s just that I’ve been talking about it so much and one person that I was talking to about it started watching it.

GIN JENNY: The problem is it doesn’t have a hook. Like, Black Sails is about pirates, you know?

WHISKEY JENNY: What do you mean it doesn’t have a hook?

GIN JENNY: I just really wanted to talk about Black Sails again.

WHISKEY JENNY: Listen, woman. It has so many found family vibes that I can’t even shake a stick at them. And if that’s not what you like, then I don’t even know what you like!

GIN JENNY: That is what I like. I mean, one reason I haven’t watched it is because I’m trying not to start new shows, because I’m trying to finish Leverage, for example—another found family vibe.

WHISKEY JENNY: These all just seem like excuses.

GIN JENNY: I mean, OK. Fair enough. [LAUGHTER] I accept that critique.

WHISKEY JENNY: However I accept the red flag that you just waved in front of me that is Leverage and agree that Leverage is a great show. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: So I’ve never finished it. I’m about to finish season three, and it’s great. And so I’m really happy about it.

WHISKEY JENNY: I never finished either. Because sometimes they would get very dark and dramatic and I didn’t want to go there with it.

GIN JENNY: Did you watch the end of season three? Is that where it got too dark and dramatic?

WHISKEY JENNY: I don’t think I watched that, because I was sensing that it was getting too dark.

GIN JENNY: No, no, it was great, actually. It was great. It was a little dark, but it was great, because Eliot was very mad, and everyone else was like, aw, you’re part of our team. And he was like, [GROWLING] I’m part of your team.

WHISKEY JENNY: [LAUGHTER] Oh, I love Eliot so much.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, it was really good. It was, in my opinion, excellent Eliot content.

WHISKEY JENNY: OK. All right. Well, he’s my favorite, so OK.

GIN JENNY: Oh, you don’t say.

WHISKEY JENNY: I know, this is shocking information. [LAUGHTER] And I know I said this before, but I really appreciate that fandom was like, you know who is garbage and we can just get rid of, is Nate and Sophie. We don’t give a shit about them. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: Oh, I don’t at all. The whole time I’m watching I’m like, man, I am about Eliot and Hardison and Parker.

WHISKEY JENNY: It’s obviously about them. Please can we stop with this Nate and Sophie bullshit?

GIN JENNY: They’re just an amazing team. And they really care about each other. It’s the best.

WHISKEY JENNY: They care about each other so much! But whatever. It’s like, Nate’s off the wagon, and Nate’s dead son. And I’m like, listen, show, what do you think I want from you? It’s not this!

GIN JENNY: I completely forgot what we were talking about because I got distracted. [LAUGHTER]

WHISKEY JENNY: You said that you liked Ruby Lang’s recent Playing House.

GIN JENNY: Right. And then—[LAUGHTER] Yes. Acute Reactions, not the best one. I think her later works are better.

WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, good. I’m excited and will thus continue to read her.

GIN JENNY: OK. Before we get into it, just a quick content warning for a bunch of underage sex, some of which is also statutory rape, and it’s discussed very graphically. And also sexual predation by a teacher.

Whiskey Jenny.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yes.

GIN JENNY: For this podcast we read Trust Exercise, which Vulture described as—I believe I’m remembering this correctly—a Russian nesting doll of unreliable narrators. It also takes place at a fancy art school partly. And I just thought, boy, Whiskey Jenny’s going to hate this. Did you hate it?

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. So much. [LAUGHTER] Boy, I sure did. [LAUGHTER] Like, from the get go. From the word go.

GIN JENNY: And at no point did it turn around for you at all?

WHISKEY JENNY: Well, it got easier to read. But I never liked it. All the way through. Did not ever like it. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: That’s what I suspected. Actually, when I was reading it, I almost texted you to apologize and call the whole thing off when I was reading the first section.

WHISKEY JENNY: Augh! [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: Because the first section is really deep into the point of view of this character, Sarah, who has a relationship with another kid, David, and they’re at this performing arts school and Houston or Atlanta. And it’s really weird. It gets very explicit about sex between the teenagers. And I felt really uncomfortable with it. It felt like a really weird way for an adult to be writing about children having sex.

WHISKEY JENNY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

GIN JENNY: I was genuinely this close to texting you and being like, let’s just not. I’ve made a mistake. Let’s just not do it.

WHISKEY JENNY: I mean, you successfully Hatened me. I would not have been sad to receive that text. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: Honestly, Whiskey Jenny, if I’d been on the bus and not at my house when I had lots of reading time, I would’ve just stopped. But because it was the weekend, I was like, well, I’ll just read a little bit more. And then we got to the second part of the book and I was like, oh, this is actually very fascinating. And then—

WHISKEY JENNY: Is it?

GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER] I knew you were going to say that.

WHISKEY JENNY: So really it’s the vagaries of the sun rising and setting and the days that made me read this book?

GIN JENNY: Yes. That’s correct.

WHISKEY JENNY: Damn you, sun.

GIN JENNY: Yeah. Well, so what happens in the second section of the book is that—so the second section is about a person who is a side character in the first section called Karen. And we learn that the first section was actually a book written by the Sarah person, and she’s now a published author. And Karen is an adult now, and she’s going to one of Sarah’s author readings in Los Angeles to meet back up with her.

I did not like the writing in this book at all, and I never did. And I don’t know that I liked the book. But I thought it was really exciting and interesting, and I found a generally positive reading experience, even though the writing was not for me and I didn’t like the characters or milieu. I was just so interested in the project of the book.

WHISKEY JENNY: I mean, I will say it is an ambitious project.

GIN JENNY: Yeah.

WHISKEY JENNY: I think I have a question about that second section. I mean, I guess this is a spoiler. But I have a question about the third section-slash-epilogue’s bearing upon the second section. Is the second section real?

GIN JENNY: I don’t know. And this is why I liked the book. Because I finished and I was like, I just have no idea. I just have no idea.

WHISKEY JENNY: Hm. OK.

GIN JENNY: And I just thought it was an interesting book about the ethics of autobiography.

WHISKEY JENNY: Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: Whiskey Jenny’s like, no, no, no.

WHISKEY JENNY: I—yeah. No. No! [LAUGHTER]

So I also did not enjoy the writing, while we’re just listing things that we didn’t like about it. [LAUGHTER] Like, did you notice all these weird, long run-on sentences? Not run-on, but just some very, very long sentences.

GIN JENNY: I don’t think so, but when I got to the second section I was so absorbed that I was noticing nothing, probably.

WHISKEY JENNY: OK. And I feel like normally in the Hatening books, I can at least be like, well, I really enjoyed—there was some writing I really enjoyed. And I didn’t even enjoy the writing.

What I did enjoy about it, I will say this. I feel like a lot of books write about that tension between two characters who are romantically interested in each other but haven’t done anything about it, and how the hyperawareness between those two people is oft-explored territory. But what I think this book got right was everyone’s reaction around that and how sometimes obvious that awareness is to other people. I think it was described, and I really liked this image, as “a wire between them that everyone had to avoid tripping on.”

GIN JENNY: Oh, interesting. I was so bored by that whole thing.

WHISKEY JENNY: A bunch of books cover characters that have the wire between them, but they don’t cover the fact that other people can see the wire. And I liked that about it.

GIN JENNY: I guess.

WHISKEY JENNY: I’m ready to talk about everything I hated about it. That was my one, all right, I haven’t read that before. Great.

GIN JENNY: I think with that I was like, oh my God, yes, yes, your relationship is SO important. Which is one reason that I liked the second section, because Karen is immediately like, [SARCASTIC] yeah, her relationship’s so important.

WHISKEY JENNY: SO important. Yeah.

GIN JENNY: Well, the other thing I liked—because I really did think this was an interesting point. The other thing that I liked is that when Karen takes over narrating, she starts talking about how Sarah wrote her own story—and Sarah is telling her own story. So fair enough, it’s her life, and people are allowed to tell their own life stories.

But Karen’s talking about all these minor details that were changed in the way Sarah recounted what happened with the cumulative impact that Karen’s life and her relationship with Sarah was completely erased. And it was interesting, because she talks about how Sarah took Karen’s attributes and distributed them to these other characters, which is a pretty reasonable thing for an author to do when writing a semi-autobiographical novel. That doesn’t seem inherently terrible. But to Karen, it’s like she’s being erased from her own story. And I thought that was really, really, really interesting.

WHISKEY JENNY: I guess for me the revelation in the second part that what you had just read was the novel was not—I don’t know. Because from the way Karen’s telling it, it’s not that far off the truth. And so it was not terribly startling? I’m not sure what that gives me. Because basically what we’re saying is, yeah, the beginning was still mostly true.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, it’s still mostly true, but the ways in which it was not true erase Karen as a person.

WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, for sure. Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. But I don’t know, I wasn’t interested by that. It was like, yeah, all right.

GIN JENNY: Well see, I guess that’s where we different. I was super interested. And also I was very interested in the way that I never felt like I had a good grasp on what happened when they were in school. The notion that it’s mostly true just leaves a lot of space for things not to be true, or to have been different than they were described. And that was, again, very exciting and interesting to me.

WHISKEY JENNY: I think this is the fundamental problem, is that is not an interesting and exciting space to me. And that’s the space that unreliable narrators rely on. [LAUGHTER] Oh look, they need something to rely on! [LAUGHTER] But that’s just not exciting territory for me. And that is, yeah, I agree, fundamentally what this book is exploring.

GIN JENNY: Well, story checks out. [LAUGHTER]

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. I mean, yeah.

GIN JENNY: I don’t have a rebuttal. I think you’re right. If it’s boring to you—it’s like me finding small town lives boring. Not in real life, just in books.

WHISKEY JENNY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I’m just going to go down the list and start saying more stuff that I dislike.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, do it. Please.

WHISKEY JENNY: Because I need to get it off my chest and then never think about this book again. Well you’ve already talked about the sex, and boy did I hate the sex.

GIN JENNY: Oh my God, I hated it so much. And having now finished the book and whatever, I still don’t think it is appropriate for an adult author to speak with that level of explicitness and like—I don’t know what the other word I’m looking for is. I don’t know, just the way that it was very—the kids are 15.

WHISKEY JENNY: 14 when they start!

GIN JENNY: Are they 14? Yeah, they’re really young.

WHISKEY JENNY: They’re 14 when the book starts. Yeah.

GIN JENNY: And I just felt acutely uncomfortable with the level of explicitness that their sex scenes are given in this book.

WHISKEY JENNY: And I was sort of trying to give it the benefit of the doubt and say that, just because this is an acutely uncomfortable time, that perhaps that was the author’s intention, and thus was successful at what they set out to do. But that still leaves to me being acutely uncomfortable.

GIN JENNY: Yeah. I just don’t think there was sufficient artistic justification for the way those sex scenes were. And I just don’t think you should be using the C-word to refer to a 14-year-old child. That’s weird.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. And also it described David’s, uh, member and said it was the C-word of an older man. And that just freaked me the fuck out. What are you talking about?

GIN JENNY: The level of anatomical attention made me really uncomfortable. And I don’t think is excused by—

WHISKEY JENNY: Artistic intention.

GIN JENNY: —any justification I can think of for it.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. Great. We covered that.

GIN JENNY: Oh, also, sorry, but last thing. She refers to them as experienced. Again, they’re 14. That’s a really messed up thing to say about a 14-year-old.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. Yeah.

GIN JENNY: That’s all I got. Go ahead.

WHISKEY JENNY: From the very beginning I hated the teacher.

GIN JENNY: Of course. God, me too.

WHISKEY JENNY: Mr. Kingsley, who is their theater trust exercises teacher. And the first time we meet him, he’s turned out all the lights and made them crawl around on the ground in the dark. Obviously Sarah, some [INAUDIBLE] grabs her boobs. And I hated him so much.

And then he always makes them—he’s always tearing them down and making fun of them. And at the very beginning, the Sarah character says that he gave them a look as if to be like, eh, you’re nothing. But maybe you aren’t. And then he also—and maybe this is just my lack of experience with theater classes, but he’s constantly making them reenact their own personal drama in front of everyone.

GIN JENNY: No. Not a thing.

WHISKEY JENNY: And I don’t feel like you can do that to children.

GIN JENNY: Yeah, it was obvious to me from the beginning that the teacher was a sexual predator.

WHISKEY JENNY: So obvious.

GIN JENNY: But in addition, even if he hadn’t been, I would have hated him because he did not respect appropriate boundaries and was just the worst and a horrible person.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. I completely agree with both of those assessments. It was extremely obvious, but also, taking that away, it was just like, what the hell are you doing to these children, man? Not cool.

GIN JENNY: Yep.

WHISKEY JENNY: All right. My next problem is, I think it was just a cruel book.

GIN JENNY: I think that’s fair to say.

WHISKEY JENNY: It was not kind to its characters, and everyone is cruel to everyone else. And just the way it describes these, again, children is really cruel. Its calling them fat, and people with peeling sunburn are disgusting, and flesh meat sacks, basically. And it was very mean.

GIN JENNY: I think that’s a fair criticism.

WHISKEY JENNY: I felt very at sea with how unspecific the time and the setting were. At first I was like, is this a boarding school? And then it’s not. It’s just a magnet school for the arts in this unnamed Southern city. And then you kind of figure out that it’s the ‘80s, because they vaguely mention Hammer pants. But those came up recently with Justin Bieber, so how am I supposed to know what year it is? I don’t know, that time and place lack of specificity was bothering me.

GIN JENNY: Great. OK.

WHISKEY JENNY: I hate the school. [LAUGHTER] And the school is so snobby and elitist. It makes the kids stay for like four hours, six hours after class and do rehearsals, and I hated it. And some freshmen don’t stay, and Sarah tries to be like, because they don’t understand the ethos. And I was rooting so hard for those freshmen. I was like, come on, kids! You can do it! [LAUGHTER] Reject the tyranny of the theater school! You can make it out, I promise!

Yeah, and then the whole, “oh, twist, it was a book” happened. And I was like, all right. And I’m still not totally sure if that part happened. I don’t know if it happened, because at the end of that, Karen shoots a guy’s dick off! [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: I love that part.

WHISKEY JENNY: So I think that in that Karen part, Karen sort of says to Sarah, how interesting that you included my statutory rape by the Martin character, but you never talked about your clearly also sexual predation by the Kingsley character. And then at the and, at the very, very end—and I guess spoilers—there’s the adopted daughter confronts—

GIN JENNY: Mr. Kingsley, whose real name is Mr. Lord.

WHISKEY JENNY: And I wasn’t—like, is it supposed to be that the whole middle part was also a sham, and that really it was just Mr. Kingsley all along who was molesting Karen and Sarah? And Mr. Kingsley as Claire’s father?

GIN JENNY: I wondered that. I wondered a lot of things. Amongst the things I wondered was, maybe she didn’t actually shoot his dick off, but she did something else. Because his dick was, like, acting up in the final section.

WHISKEY JENNY: [ALMOST INCOMPREHENSIBLE WITH LAUGHTER] I’m sorry, can you say more about that? [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: I don’t remember. There’s some—he gets his dick out, doesn’t he, when Claire comes to visit him?

WHISKEY JENNY: I might have not read it closely. Because it was so gross about the way it talked about dicks.

GIN JENNY: That’s fine. There’s something up with his dick. And it could be that he’s just old, but it also certainly seems plausible he had sustained some dick injury in the past.

WHISKEY JENNY: Interesting.

GIN JENNY: So I wasn’t sure. I really wasn’t sure. And I think it left a lot open to interpretation. Which again, I know that that doesn’t thrill you, but I thought it was really interesting. And I didn’t know what parts of each story had been conflated. And so I think there was truth in all the sections, but I think the author left it an open question, which things were literally true and which things were where fictional liberties had been taken.

WHISKEY JENNY: I was going to say, if you say emotional truth in the way that Mr. Kingsley did, I was going to jump through this podcast cord and yell. OK, fine. [LAUGHTER]

Some more things I did not like. Well, no, you who I did like was Sarah’s mom. Team Sarah’s Mom. Well, who could have done more, but who tried to argue with the school and be like, what the hell? This Mr. Kingsley character is clearly up to no good. I really thought she got short shrift.

Boy. Something else I hated was—

GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER]

WHISKEY JENNY: —the scene between Liam and Sarah in which they have sex and Liam refers to his member as his willy. And then he says—I just can’t be alone with this, so I am going to say it, but I apologize in advance. His dirty talk is, “it’s in your squashy wet tight squashy hot.”

GIN JENNY: Ew. Ew. I am sad that you reminded me of that, which I had fortunately forgotten.

WHISKEY JENNY: Well, if I have to read that, then you have to remember it.

GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER]

WHISKEY JENNY: I will end on a happy note and say that one line I really liked—or no, two lines I read liked is, at one point she’s talking about the anger that we have at the person who spoils our own idea of ourself. I thought that was very well-phrased.

And then she also talks about the way that perms, or dying your hair or things like that, is that young girls vandalize their bodies in order to prove that it’s theirs. And I really appreciated that insight, yeah.

GIN JENNY: Cool.

WHISKEY JENNY: But nothing else! [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: All right. Here’s my final question. If you had to choose to reread this or reread The Easter Parade, which one would you choose?

WHISKEY JENNY: I would burn the whole world down. I would not choose. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: No, you have to choose.

WHISKEY JENNY: Um, I think I might reread The Easter Parade.

GIN JENNY: That’s what I was going to guess, yeah.

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah.

GIN JENNY: Wow. That’s amazing.

WHISKEY JENNY: Just because rereading this now knowing what you know, I think, would be even more unbearable for me.

GIN JENNY: I almost finished it and reread the whole thing again. And the reason I didn’t is I didn’t like the writing, and I was so uncomfortable with the way that children having sex was portrayed.

OK, Whiskey Jenny, I’m really sorry I did this to you. Having heard your litany of complaints, there’s a large part of me that wishes I had just called the whole thing off, and I’m sorry. I apologize.

WHISKEY JENNY: [LAUGHTER] I mean, you don’t have to apologize. That is the point of the Hatening. But like, great job. I hated it.

GIN JENNY: OK, well, tell me your revenge on me, because I deserve it.

WHISKEY JENNY: I mean, it is. Now I feel bad, because it is a form of revenge upon you.

GIN JENNY: No, I deserve it. Hit me.

WHISKEY JENNY: You don’t. You don’t. But we are reading a classic of Irish literature. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: Oh, God.

WHISKEY JENNY: Which, I have to say, was a recommendation by Ashley. She was like, I feel like you have not plumbed the depths of Gin Jenny’s hatred of Irish literature. And I was like, you’re so right.

GIN JENNY: That was a great call.

WHISKEY JENNY: You’re so right.

GIN JENNY: Oh, please don’t tell me it’s a Frank McCourt book.

WHISKEY JENNY: It’s not a Frank McCourt book. But it is set in a small town, and it’s an ensemble of characters. And not much happens in it. It’s just really delving into the quotidian, ordinary, everyday life of these multiple characters.

GIN JENNY: [LAUGHTER] Oh, God.

WHISKEY JENNY: It is called That They May Face the Rising Sun. [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: What? That is the worst title!

WHISKEY JENNY: [LAUGHTER] By John McGahern. And I have to say, I started out trying to Google bougainvillea books. [LAUGHTER] And the one that I picked last year came up as a result! [LAUGHTER] The House at the End of Night came up, and I was like, well, I feel like I did it, then.

GIN JENNY: Yeah. Oh my God. I’m looking at the description, and it includes the line—

WHISKEY JENNY: [LAUGHTER]

GIN JENNY: No, no. I’m going to need you to listen to this.

WHISKEY JENNY: OK.

GIN JENNY: “By the novel’s close, we feel that we have been introduced with deceptive simplicity to a complete representation of existence—” I’m not done! “An enclosed world has been transformed into an Everywhere.” And lest we miss this detail, “Everywhere” is capitalized. Thanks, I hate it. [LAUGHTER]

WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. So that’s what we’re reading!

GIN JENNY: Wow, I think that you have done a great—are you actually excited to read this?

WHISKEY JENNY: Yes! Yes. I love a small town book.

GIN JENNY: I truly don’t understand how anyone could be. [SARCASTIC] Thanks a lot, Ashley.

WHISKEY JENNY: I love a small town story. I love an ensemble story. And sorry, by small town, I mean ensemble story. And I definitely like Irish literature more than you do.

GIN JENNY: I mean, everyone likes Irish lit—I think it’s really funny that my family is Irish, and I am from the South, and those are the two bodies of literature that I absolutely cannot abide.

WHISKEY JENNY: So, yeah.

GIN JENNY: [SIGH] All right. All right, all right, fair enough, fair enough, fair enough. [LAUGHTER]

WHISKEY JENNY: The tables have turned, haven’t they?

GIN JENNY: The tables have turned. Ooh, boy. All right.

WHISKEY JENNY: This has been the Reading the End Bookcast with the demographically similar Jennys. You can visit the blog at readingtheend.com. You can follow us on Twitter @readingtheend. We’re both on Goodreads as Whiskey Jenny and Gin Jenny. And you can email us—please do, we love hearing from you—at readingtheend@gmail.com. If you like what we do, you can become a podcast patron at patreon.com/readingtheend. And if you’re listening to us on iTunes, please leave us a review.

And until next time, a quote from The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. “If we win, I will drive home afterward and be as broken and flimsy as ever I was.”

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