Author: Jenn Northington

Hello and happy Monday, Epic folks! It’s the last regular Monday of December (again I ask, how!?) which means we’ll be wrapping up What Are You Reading? this week and moving to our new model for Insiders as of January 1st. It is truly wild how time flies. We can’t say thank you enough for being such staunch supporters and book enthusiasts, so we’ll just keep saying it: thank you!

The comments will be open through the end of December, so as always feel free to weigh in on your year-end reading there, and we’ll see you (just in different places) in 2023!

-Jenn

What Are You Reading?

I believe this is the final What Are You Reading!

I don’t have much new to report since my last update — I’m still working through Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, but I’ve also picked up At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis. It’s a story about WWI, which is unusual for me, but it’s the perspective that intrigued me. It’s told from the point of view of Senegalese man Alfa Ndiaye, who is fighting as a “Chocolat” soldier for the French army. Fighting the war has brought the first instance of Alfa being away from his village, and he is, understandably, not adjusting well. When his friend is gravely injured and asks Alfa to put him out of his misery, Alfa can’t do it, and the grief and guilt go to his head. As a result, he starts a grim ritual that sees him crossing over into enemy territory every night. The more he does it — and the more…souvenirs he collects — the more the other soldiers start to think he’s some sort of demon.

The potential supernatural aspect of the book is totally up my alley, but it is not my usual fare for around the holidays. It is, admittedly, a little awkward to read after partaking in some of my holiday traditions, like watching Home Alone 2, for instance. The cozy mysteries I have fit more comfortably with the typical entertainment I consume around the holidays: one, Murder by Page One by Olivia Matthews, which follows a Brooklyn librarian who recently relocated to Georgia. When she discovers a dead body in a bookstore, her friend becomes a suspect and it’ll be up to her to clear her friend’s name. I may also pick up the fifth Gethsemane Brown book, Execution in E. For the uninitiated, the Gethsemane Brown cozy mystery series follows Gethsemane, a Black American classical musician living in a charming Irish village who can communicate with ghosts. I absolutely loved reading about her and the cute Irish setting last winter, and would love to again.

As I balance my holiday reading, what have you picked up lately? Let us know!

-Erica

Happy Monday, Epic folks, and happy almost-mid-December (How??). My wish for us all is that we hear the exact amount of holiday music we want (whether that be zero or round-the-clock Mariah Carey).

And now, books!

-Jenn

What Are You Reading?

Hello again, Insiders!

I’m back from my Boston trip to report that I read a total of…one book! (lol)

It was Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk. It takes place in 1940s Chicago and follows magical detective Helen who was disgraced years ago because of a deal she made with the devil to save her brother’s life. It’s been nearly 10 years exactly since she made the deal, which means she has a few days left before her life ends. But then she gets an offer to solve the case of the White City Vampire — a serial killer who’s been committing gruesome murders all over the city — in exchange for the soul that she owes hell. I really enjoyed this novella with its sapphic speakeasies and other noir-ish details that felt naturally woven in. The book also did an excellent job of showing what it meant to be a queer woman in the ’40s. My only complaint is about her brother, who felt annoyingly naive at times, but there’s always at least one of those characters! If you’ve read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Next on my list to finish are the other books I mentioned before: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and the poetry collection Golden Ax by Rio Cortez. During my time off, I also got into the animated show Harley Quinn on HBO. And by got into it, I mean I marathoned it and watched all three seasons in a few days. I’d been hearing good things about it for a minute, and feel like it totally lived up to the hype. Because of it, I may get into a few comics this upcoming week. We’ll see.

What have you been reading? Let us know in the comments!

-Erica

Hello and happy Monday, Epic folks! And Happy December (unless you’re one of the folks who dislikes it, in which case, condolences).

Announcements

As you’ve probably already seen, we have a big announcement regarding Insiders going into 2023. You won’t notice anything different with your account until January rolls around, and in the meantime you’ve got options!

What Are You Reading?

I’m currently wrestling with which books I should bring with me on a Boston trip with a friend. While the train ride will be around seven hours or so, I’m packing light, meaning I can’t cater to my mood-reading inclinations. There are books that I’ve been meaning to finish — like The Secret Society of Irregular Witches (which I saw Vanessa mention a month ago), Scout’s Honor by Lily Anderson, and Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki — but there are also ones I haven’t started that I’m excited to.

Fortunately, I have the books I’ve already started in a mix of audio and ebook formats, so they won’t take up actual space. But then there are the physical books I want to take! There’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which has been talked about in quite a few best-of book lists, and has also been sitting on my bookshelf for the longest, judging me. It’s about friends who have known each other for a while when they become partners in making video games. Let’s just say they experience all the ups and downs. I love how this is mostly about a friendship, as opposed to a romantic relationship.

I’m also considering packing Rio Cortez’s Golden Ax, a poetry collection that explores the history of Black pioneers in the Western U.S while still considering the present and the future. And then I’ve been feeling like getting into a hard-boiled ’20s or ’30s detective story, so I’m wondering whether I should bring the queer sff novella Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk, or The Conjure-Man Dies by Rudolph Fisher. Conjure Man was actually written in the ’30s and is the first detective novel written by a Black American. We’ll see which I land on.

If you were going on a trip next week, which books would you take? Tell us in the comments!

Erica

Hello Insiders! It’s Monday, and that means it’s time to talk about books.

No announcements today, just me blathering about rebooting my reading for 2023!

What Are You Reading?

Hello Insiders! It’s Jenn, filling in for Vanessa who is enjoying some time off. And I was not sad to fill in, because I am doing a total overhaul of the way I read and I am excited to tell someone, anyone, about it.

There are a few things that happened in the last few months: Get Booked ended (RIP!); the Read Harder podcast episodes for the 2022 Challenge are all recorded; and the plug-in that removes expirations from my digital galleys well and truly broke, and after searching pretty thoroughly it seems clear that there’s no good replacement for it. Which means that I can’t just download galleys willy-nilly and rely on having them when I want/need them for work reading; I have to do something else, and honestly that realization completely broke my brain. I also barely managed to do the reading I needed to do for work this year; for reasons I don’t fully understand, I had a harder time reading in 2022 than I did in any other year, and that is saying something. (I’m part mood-reader, part work-reader, and between my moods being all over the place and real difficulties we all lived through, it was … rough.)

So, rather than getting frustrated and berating myself as is my wont, I decided to use this as an opportunity to rethink how and what I read. Work-wise, I’ll just be reading for SFF Yeah!, and that’s my wheelhouse anyway. I also like to have an assortment of things going — nonfiction, lighter fare like romances, genres I don’t usually reach for like mystery, etc. But where will I get those books?

I’ve built a queue system, that goes something like this:

• See a book or hear about one, tag it in Edelweiss or on Storygraph with the tag “queue”
• Once a week, review the tagged books to see if any are available from the library — if so, put in a hold request (almost nothing is ever available right away these days) and note it on the new “TBR” tab of my reading spreadsheet
• Review the ones not available from the library to see if I can get an e-galley AND if I’m in the mood to read it (since I don’t have unlimited time anymore)
• Read what comes in from the library and/or Edelweiss!

It seems both really complicated and very simple, and who knows how long it will last or if it will work. But it seemed worth a try.

Currently, my queue has brought me The White Mosque by Sofia Samatar which is an amazingly sharp, thoughtful, incisive memoir plus some history about her life as a biracial woman in the Mennonite and Muslim communities. I’m savoring every page. And the library sent me Kate Clayborn’s Love Lettering, which everyone has been recommending to me for ages and which definitely lived up to the hype.

Anyone else out there changing up their reading habits for 2023? Share in the comments!

-Jenn

Hello fellow booknerds,

Thanks for being New Books enthusiasts! We wanted to let you know about an upcoming change to your subscription.

On December 1, 2022, the cost of the “New Books, Who Dis” level will be raised from $2.99 to $4.99. Your subscription will automatically renew at the updated price on your next renewal date following December 1st, unless you cancel at least a day in advance. If you’d like to make any changes to your account, you can click right here.

Happy book-browsing!,

The Insiders Team