Never doubt that if there is a good article about The Westing Game, I will include that article in my links round-up. The Westing Game 5ever! (link)

Someone has to stop Paul Hollywood. Brian Phillips has a plan. (link)

The bind of being first. (link)

A fact: I will virtually ALWAYS pick up a whodunnit set in India & written by an Indian author. (link)

Catullus is a wonderful, rebellious, vulgar mess. Also, Cy Twombly. Because why wouldn’t Anne Carson write about both? God, I love Anne Carson. (link)

Talia Levin wrote about white supremacist online spaces, and the results are… expectedly horrifying. She talks about it here with ZORA‘s Anjali Enjeti. (link)

Rediscovering women authors from the heyday of ghost stories. (link)

This piece about anonymous Republican critics of Trump is a biting indictment of its own genre. (link)

I am Second Murderer but I did quietly disapprove of Macbeth’s policies. (a companion piece to the above) (link)

DOLLY PARTON. That is all. (link)

An appreciation of Witch Week. (link)

Nisi Shawl is very smart on the topic of what to think about when you’re considering writing a story about a marginalization you don’t share. (link)

This is a wonderful interview with two wonderful romance authors, Olivia Dade and Rebekah Weatherspoon! (link)

And this is an also-wonderful interview with some of my favorite SFF editors, talking about how SFF has changed and where it’s headed. (link)

Dwight K. Schrute kinda typifies our Political Moment, which makes it hard to watch him. I personally stopped my The Office rewatch sometime in season four because I couldn’t take Dwight OR Jim OR Michael, so ban men, basically. (link)

I guess “ban men” is not a bad note to leave things on! Stay safe out there, friends!

The post Fixing the Great British Bake-Off: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Patricia Highsmith’s diaries are going to be published in 2021. I still haven’t read The Price of Salt, and I am mad at myself about it. Maybe that will be one of my small goals for 2020.

The kids are frankly fucking inspiring.

I was super intrigued by this post about the sexist ways the Austens and Brontes are often portrayed in biographies and fiction.

“Most of us writing now were not educated by that expanded canon.” Alexander Chee on writing stories about people who are different than you.

Dahlia Lithwick hasn’t been back to the Supreme Court since Kavanaugh was confirmed. From the reporter who brought us the Chaos Muppet / Order Muppet theory as part of her Supreme Court reporting, this is devastating. It’s devastating anyway. Fuck the patriarchy.

Listen. Listen. Listen. I have no opinion about whether Jeffrey Epstein was murdered or died by suicide because I am not qualified to assess the evidence. But I do want to be able to depend on people who are qualified to assess the evidence, which, um.

Dialogue from the husbands in every haunted house movie.

Carmen Maria Machado wrote her memoir of surviving a queer abusive relationship because she could not find such books to support her when she was in the midst of the experience. Here’s also a review of her book that I thought was really good.

New English Canaan was a 1637 book that harshly critiqued the Puritan colonizers in America. Sounds fascinating, no?

The demise of Deadspin has been miserable to witness. Anna Merlan reports: Blogging is hard.

“Romance novels are social novels.” Adriana Herrera (an awesome writer!) on the possibilities that diverse romance novels offer.

Attention please, these are all the holiday movies. Brace for incoming.

Malka Older talks utopia, dystopia, and the necessity of imagining better futures for ourselves.

Feminist bookstores are having a renaissance in the South.

That’s all for today! Have a wonderful weekend, please topple the patriarchy responsibly, and I’ll see you back here on Monday, when we will all recommence weeping and tearing our hair over the future (slash, doom?) of the world.

The post I Really Need to Read The Price of Salt Already: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

You know what there aren’t enough of, team? Books about chimp language research. I would read one a day on all the days if that were a possible thing, ever since I listened to the Lucy episode of RadioLab in 2010. And I lovety-love-loved a book that it’s a spoiler to tell you is about chimp language research even though that’s the only reason why I read it in the first place (don’t click the link if you are uptight about spoilers), and what with one thing and another, me and chimp language research books are truly the greatest of pals. When I heard that Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel, We Love You Charlie Freeman, was a book about chimp language research plus the American history of scientific racism, I pretty much died of joy.

In the 1990s, Charlotte Freeman and her family have come to the Toneybee Institute to teach Charlie the chimpanzee how to sign. They are to take Charlie in as a member of their family, immerse him in ASL and affection, and report the results to Toneybee. But the institute’s motive for selecting a black family for this job may not have been altogether pure, as Charlotte begins to discover its history of institutionalized racism (and shoddy science).

(If you’re clapping your hands reading that description, you are approximating my reaction when I first learned about this book.)

There’s so much to explore in a book with this premise, from the ethics of scientific experiments on animals to the wavery line that divides us from them to the history of using science to dehumanize people of color to the way families relate to each other. All of these things fascinate me, and appear to fascinate the author, too. Disappointingly, although she picks up all of these awesome ideas and tosses them into the air at the book’s beginning, she then doesn’t have fast enough reflexes (or enough hands? I don’t know, y’all, I’m not sure why I started this juggling metaphor anyway) to stick the landing (it doesn’t count as mixing metaphors if both of them are circus-related) (shut up) (nobody asked you).

With that said, Greenidge’s writing is funny and lucid, and I wanted to follow her on every one of the roads this book started to walk down. It’s just that none of them really seemed to go anywhere. But as first novel problems go, leaving the reader wanting more of all your ideas is a pretty good one to have. I’ll be following the author’s continued career with much interest.

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