Here’s what it’s like to be an audiobook narrator.

I wouldn’t exactly call Gaudy Night an “overlooked” novel but that doesn’t mean I will turn up my nose at this appreciation of Gaudy Night and its heroine, my favorite character in all of literature, Harriet Vane.

So here’s the thing about My Favorite Murder. (Disclosure, I am not a true crime person so I do not have any motive to defend MFM except that many of my friends adore it.)

What to buy the children in your life this holiday season. There is so much truth in this post, especially the part about how children love office supplies.

WELP this is a horrifying article about the TV show Almost Family and how traumatizing it is for people who have actually found themselves in the sit this com purports to represent.

Petition to rename the Iron Age the Flax Age.

So a private equity firm has bought up the dot-org registry, which means that .org at the end of a website will no longer mean nonprofit. Eat the fuckin rich.

Courttia Newland talks about ways that white women demean and harass black men, largely depending on the stereotype of hypersexual black masculinity.

“When you order something from Amazon and you’ve worked inside Amazon, you wonder, ‘Hey, is ordering my package going to be the demise of somebody?’” On the (un)safety practices at Amazon’s fulfillment warehouses. A reminder that if you can avoid shopping at Amazon, it’s good to avoid it. They are very evil over there.

Government policy penalize disabled people for working or getting married.

This is a really amazing podcast, and I admire and respect Joey Clift so much for doing this. Native comedian Joey Clift was asked onto a podcast to talk about gross stereotypes of Native Americans in a video game. On Thanksgiving. He called the podcast hosts out on this.

I’m reliably in love with “these books are overlooked” lists, so I adore this Lithub round-up of the best overlooked books of the decade.

“In his fiction, marriage is a force intended to control women; in life, he acted as though marriage was intended to trap men.” On marriage and domestic companionship in Wilkie Collins’s life and fiction.

Some thoughts on how major African literary prizes are contributing to the work of canon formation. (This reminded me v much of Toni Morrison saying that canon building is empire building. Phew.)

Alejandro Zambra on learning English and writing for translation.

Black film critics are facing backlash for criticisms of Queen and Slim. Andre Wheeler talks to Clarkisha Kent and Angelica Jade Bastién about the phenomenon.

And that’s it for now! Have a wonderful weekend, and fill up your Christmas lists with the NPR Book Concierge recommendations!

The post Does Anything but the NPR Book Concierge Matter? 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.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Zambra says this:

Those tests have multiple “authors,” but when we were kids we thought there was only one, a single God-dictator-author, who knew all the right answers and hid them. While I was writing the book, I thought a lot about how those exercises were, in a way, the opposite of literature. They teach you to put stories in order, for example, following some kind of fixed structure—from the abstract to the concrete, chronologically, from the general to the particular.

This all sounds very somber, and Multiple Choice is anything but. If there can be good, un-cynical parodies of dictatorships, Multiple Choice is one, and in a reading week where my brain was 90% blank terror for the future of our democracy and only about 10% available for processing words in books, it was a lighthearted read that didn’t feel like a cop-out from what’s happening in the world right now. Zambra is kidding on the round, because while dictatorships are absurd, their absurdity is a rhetorical disguise for the very real oppression they’re trying to get you to overlook.

For instance, the fourth section asks you to choose which sentences may be eliminated from a paragraph without damaging the meaning of what’s being said. Zambra launches into the story of a good man who didn’t mean any harm: Sure, the narrator acknowledges that he hated gay people and knew about the torture and disappearances, but so did everyone, didn’t they? And he was still fundamentally a good guy. Not a villain. One of the answer options lets you eliminate all the sentences that mention specific crimes, leaving only this:

(1) I was his friend, I was his pal. I knew him. And it’s not true what they say about him. Some things, sure, but not all of it. I care about what they say, it hurts. It’s as if they were talking about me.

(12) Whatever they may say of him, it’s easy enough to badmouth him now that he’s dead. But I would like you all to know that my friend isn’t all that dead, because he still has me, come what may. I’ll always defend him. Always, buddy–always.

TOO REAL, n’est-ce pas?

A government-controlled structure like the standardized test forces you to choose between a finite set of options, of which zero might make sense — but getting it right (for the government’s definition of “right”) will shape your future and the possibilities that will be open to you. I tried not to apply Multiple Choice too literally to America’s situation, even though I feel real damn dire. But one thing I took away from it, as I read headline after headline in supposedly liberal newspapers that refused to identify Steve Bannon as a white nationalist and anti-Semite, is that the words we use over the next four years are going to be everything. We can’t back away from the truth, no matter how ugly it is.

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