I read bell hooks’s work in a gender studies my senior year of college, and I have desperately admired her ever since. I’m heartbroken about her death this week. Here’s a round-up of social media tributes to her. (link)

SHARKS. (link)

The new documentary about the Janet Jackson / Justin Timberlake thing will infuriate you. Relatedly, between this and the Brittany Spears thing, do we feel that the New York Times Presents team has a grudge against Justin Timberlake and are now hunting him most-dangerous-game style? Love that journey for him. (link)

You don’t have to finish books you’re not enjoying (but you can if you want). (link)

Everybody alllllllways stays saying they’re right about to find proof of the grandeur of King Solomon’s kingdom, and they never, ever are about to find it. But still this archaeology is cool. But omg, everyone calm down about Solomon. (link)

“The last essay I’ll need to write about David Foster Wallace.” (link)

IT’S NOT JUST YOU: Movie dialogue has been getting less comprehensible, and it’s due to a lot of factors relating to sound design, and also it is not the fault of the sound design people. (link)

Funny cat pictures as trojan horses for misinformation campaigns. Whew. (link)

THEY’RE ALL MORMON. All of them. Every single one. (link)

The American prison system is cracking down on books, because honestly why not. Why not make everyone’s lives as fully bad as possible? (I hate it here.) (link)

Ijeoma Oluo offers some guidelines for thinking about when a story you want to tell belongs to you. (link)

The Netflix Christmas movie cinematic universe is an absolutely wild place to be. (link)

“Professors on campus learned the university could cite no research to support its arguments that Munger Hall’s windowless bedrooms are more than glorified torture chambers.” I love the Dormzilla story so much; it’s so fucking deranged. (link)

Why are university press books so expensive? Hint: It’s not because academic publishers have a boner for keeping costs high. (link)

“What happened next felt like a windfall, an affirmation of my work.” Research makes your fiction richer and better, period. (link)

This piece about Latasha Harlins, the Black child whose murder sparked the 1992 riots in L.A., made me cry. (link)

“I implore you to remember that they are people, not mysteries for you to solve.” Couch Guy on virality and the sleuths of TikTok. (link)

“There’s an entire talk about this wave of Shrek culture at the symposium by a baffled Englishman who has carefully documented the fan fiction of extreme sexual violence, erotic fiction, and in my case, selling nudes covered in green body paint at the tail end of 2015.” The incomparable Jamie Loftus discusses the fan cultures of Shrek online. (link)

This woman went to a restaurant that appears never to have heard of dinner. The chef responded with a three-page declaration that’s somehow even better than you hoped it would be. (link)

Stephen King really REALLY hates fat people. (link)

The discipline of philosophy hates fat people too, but noted feminist philosopher Kate Manne is trying to divest from her internalized anti-fatness. (link)

“The terms for what becomes a culture war story are not decided by the public. Instead, they are decided in newsrooms that don’t mirror reality but certainly help shape it.” (link)

Why is there a typeface called Jim Crow? (link)

“A curious side effect of eliding the explicit queer romance in both the donghua and the live action is that rather than straight-washing the story, it just makes every character and every relationship read as approximately 400% more gay. Why is that? I do not know. Research is ongoing.” This is a post about storytelling in The Untamed, a show that I adore. (link)

Some anticipated books lists for you to enjoy while we all twiddle our thumbs waiting for The Millions to do its thing: The Most Anticipated Crime Fiction of 2022 (link). Queer Adult SFF Books of 2022 (link to Twitter thread). Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2022 (link). The Year of YA Authors Publishing Adult Fiction (link to Twitter thread).

Please feel free to link me to other Anticipated Books of 2022 lists, for I cannot get enough of them! I am sorry because I know there are too many lists possibly but omg I love lists.

The post Didn’t Post Any Links in December: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

2019 JENNY IS FUN.

Now that literally everyone but me has done their best of 2018 post, I thought I’d enter the game. You have ceased to care but I CANNOT BE STOPPED. We’re breaking this business down by categories, so let’s get into it. First up: YA!

I read a ton this year, but somehow I don’t feel like I got in as much YA reading as I wanted! Luckily there were some standouts. The Summer of Jordi Perez is a doll of an f/f contemporary romcom, with a fat aspiring fashion designer MC, and plenty of emotional negotiation. It felt like reading an injection of sunshine. Seafire, by Natalie Parker, is the perfect ladies seafaring adventure that I needed to round out my year of reading. If you enjoyed Sarah Tolcser’s excellent Song of the Current series (I did!), Seafire is a good readalike. The girls in it are fierce, and their friendships are the book’s center. It’s also got marvelous worldbuilding. Hugely recommend. (Thanks to Charlotte for the rec!)

I have raved in this space a bunch already about Anna-Marie McLemore, but brace yourself for a bit more raving about her latest, Blanca and Roja. It’s about two sisters in a family that always has two girls; and when the younger one reaches a certain age that I cannot currently remember, one of the two girls is transformed into a swan. Blanca and Roja deconstructs the good-sister-evil-sister trope in ways that are consistently unexpected and lovely. The consistency with which McLemore produces these beautifully written queer Latina fairy tales blows me away. She’s one of those authors who makes me feel lucky to be a reader. (If you liked Sarah McCarry’s books, McLemore is similarly dreamy and gorgeous.)

(Hey, when is Sarah McCarry going to write another book?)

I’ve noticed that the less literary fiction I read, the fewer authors I read from other countries. I’m hoping to change this in 2019! I’d like to read more genre fiction by authors from other countries, even though I recognize that less of it gets published in America even than the heavily-American literary fiction genre. Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, translated by Megan McDowell, came to me via the Tournament of Books, which I was half-assedly trying to participate in by real-quick reading a short entrant before bed. I do not recommend this strategy. Fever Dream is incredibly scary — one of those horror books where you are deeply uneasy from the get-go, and the feeling of unease persists long after the book is over.

Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater reminds me of Helen Oyeyemi a little, in the dreaminess of the writing and the perpetual uncertainty about what’s real. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel about a Nigerian child who has more than one self inside her. I am not sure how else to describe this book. Trigger warning for rape. The writing is unbelievably gorgeous, the book is deeply strange, I loved it.

Occasionally someone will come to me asking for a book rec where the writing, the characters, and the plot are all superb. This is a very hard rec request to fulfill, and I pretty much just always shove Fingersmith at them. But now I have another book that meets these requirements, and it is Esi Edugyan’s wonderful historical novel, Washington Black. Though the first bit of the story is hard to read (it’s set on a plantation in Barbados in the early 1800s), it’s absolutely worth pushing through. Washington Black is a slave who gets taken on as a sort of apprentice and assistant to the plantation owner’s brother, a scientist and abolitionist who is working less on abolishing slavery than he is trying to build an airship. I was absolutely blown away by this book: It explores so many themes and ideas and histories without ever feeling overstuffed, and I wrote down approximately ten million quotes from it because of how insightful and interesting the writing is.

My most-recommended book of the year — although partly because I didn’t read Washington Black until December — is Tara Westover’s Educated. Recommended to me by the wonderful For Real podcast, it’s a memoir about a girl who grew up in a extreme survivalist Mormon family that didn’t get her a birth certificate or send her to school. I can’t overstate how bonkers this book is, and I 90% recommended it to people to ensure that I wouldn’t have to be alone with all the shit that went down in this woman’s life. It’s about the ways abuse can sit beside love in a family, and Westover does not downplay her ongoing trauma.

My other two best-of-nonfiction picks are about gender and race and how they function in our lives. Ijeoma Iluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race is a terrific primer on some of the most common questions and ideas that come up in conversations about race in America. She’s typically sharp and critical, exploring the many, many ways racism continues to shape American life in systemic ways. (If you haven’t yet read her interview with Rachel Dolezal, you should do so now.) Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is an quite-academic book about sexism that’s worth plowing through if you can. I screamed YES so many times while reading it.

The wonderful Bridget put me onto Jade City with her relentless advocacy of it, and I am not sorry she did. It’s kind of a mafia/martial arts/magic story set in an alternate universe where jade gives you magical strength and a group of powerful families controls the country in a delicate balance. Fonda Lee’s worldbuilding is superb, down to gestures and phrases that make her world feel textured and real. I loved it and I can’t wait for the sequel. The Descent of Monsters, by JY Yang, is actually the third in its novella series, but my favorite in the series so far. It’s written partly as a bureaucratic report, which is — of course — the way to my heart. I’ve loved watching Yang grow as a writer over the course of the Tensorate series, and I remain perpetually in delight to see what they do next.

SL Huang’s Zero Sum Game rivals Seafire for making me just feel happy while reading it. It’s just a damn good adventure that reminds you why you like reading. Cas Russell is a math genius and minor criminal who gets sucked into a corporate conspiracy that goes far beyond anything she could have imagined. Grudging respect is built. Math is used to do fights. It fucking rules. (Sequel to follow in 2019 – yay!)

And that’s it for 2018! Did you read any of these? What were some of your favorites for the year? Are you going to read Washington Black or do I need to pester you about it some more?

The post The Best of 2018 appeared first on Reading the End.

Disney princesses reimagined as cement mixers.

Here’s what’s going on at Tumblr.

Period-tracking apps benefit men, and marketers, and medical companies–not women.

What it’s like hearing Anne Carson lecture.

This journalist went to a Scholastic book fair and didn’t find it as magical as she remembered — but somehow this article just made me feel MORE fond and MORE magical about Scholastic book fairs. So, win?

“The work of black public intellectuals is shaped by white gatekeepers….There is power lost when the oppressor serves as interlocutor.” Mychal Denzel Smith on what it means to be a black public intellectual.

Jezebel talks to a biographer of Queen Anne to find out the truth behind the new movie The Favourite.

Here’s all the money the American taxpayer is spending on Confederate monuments and iconography.

An excellent profile of NK Jemisin, who is an excellent writer. Yay!

What happens when a fic goes mainstream?

Another excellent piece about the missing mothers of SFF, this time by Aliette de Bodard, a writer I like more and more as time goes on.

Author Ijeoma Oluo unpacks a few of the ways systemic racism functions in this interview.

Let’s find a way to put to rest the idea that there are “male brains” and “female brains.” (Yay Cordelia Fine!)

Here are the stories of eight “token black actors” from 90s TV shows.

The post ‘Tis the season for NPR Book Concierge!: A links round-up appeared first on Reading the End.

In thrilling news, Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon IS TOMORROW. Can you tell I’m excited? I am SO excited. I have an aunt coming into town, so I don’t know exactly how many hours I’ll end up being able to do, but I’m excited about whatever it turns out to be.

Molly Ringwald wrote a really fascinating piece about sexual harassment and her films with John Hughes.

Junot Diaz writes with extraordinary power and honesty about being raped as a child. Trigger warning for child sexual abuse, ofc.

After taking the top prize at Sundance yet somehow not being picked up by a distributor, The Miseducation of Cameron Post finally has a distributor and will be available to watch in the summer. Yay!

It’s okay to give up on books you aren’t enjoying. Let the switch flip in your brain, and set yourself free from the prison of books that aren’t a good fit for you. The mindset “Maybe I didn’t give up forever” is the one that has helped me a lot.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is incisive on the subject of NFL cheerleaders and the problem with the NFL setting itself up as the guardian of moral virtue.

How publishing is changing (and not) w/r/t race and gender.

Millicent Simmonds, one of the stars of the new film The Quiet Place, wrote a piece for Teen Vogue about becoming the deaf role model she never had.

Mikki Kendall on the two black men arrested at Starbucks for existing there. Black customers are inherently perceived as threatening, which is what leads to situations like this one. And last but not least, here’s a round table of some of my favorite writers talking about navigating public spaces while black. (If you’re not following all these people you should be! They’re great.)

How grad school applications can become performances of trauma for applicants from marginalized groups.

I can’t assess the accuracy of this piece about how East Asian narrative traditions differs from Western narrative traditions, but it’s a really interesting read. I want to keep this in mind when I’m reading books from China and Japan in the future.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the best show on TV but it does have a tonal dissonance problem in how it portrays the moral implications of various actions. Irene Yoon and Lili Loofbourow break it down.

On constructing a kinder future (in the stories we create and consume).

Not sure what’s been going on with FanCon? Clarkisha Kent has the depressing scoop. Rosie Knight and Jazmine Joyner have another very detailed breakdown of all the nitty-gritty details, at Women Write about Comics.

Skin care marketing is often just selling whiteness.

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