Hello! :) Bookwench #2 Reporting In. Here’s A Little About Me...I’m Alia, I’m 27 Years Old And

A Feminist Reading List for the Holidays: Books by strong, spirited, whip-smart, flawed, fantastic, human, devastatingly talented women for anyone - female, male, or otherwise - on your list.

My Life On The Road by Gloria Steinem

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Hissing Cousins by Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer

Isabella: The Warrior Queen by Kirstin Downey

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

A House Of My Own by Sandra Cisneros

Fates & Furies by Lauren Groff

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar

The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan

Missoula by Jon Krakauer

Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

You Don’t Have to Like Me by Alida Nugent (@thefrenemy​)

Peruse all of our holiday lists here!

The War In Our Stars

Kylo Ren: It's a metaphor

Kylo Ren: you wear the scary breathing mask but you don't actually need it to breathe

(lol sorry for the weird ass pic.  This coffee place is super crowded and I can’t smile at my computer without people looking at me like I have the plague)

Heyoo!  I’m Melissa and I’m Book Wench number… four?  I am 24, live in good ol’ New York City, and I used to work with these lovely ladies in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Well, I’m def no stranger to the book industry.  Former English major, former production editor at Pearson, former Cincinnati bookseller, current freelance editor (Mosaic Editing holler at me, this is a shameless plug for your editing services), current bookseller at Books of Wonder.  I’m currently working on procuring a full-time job in publishing (aren’t we all HA HA HA).

A little about myself: I love Beyoncé with every fiber of my being.  More than is really healthy probs.  I listen to a lot of Christmas music.  I’m really into astrology currently even though I’m very skeptical of it (it doesn’t make sense to me either).  My favorite author is Hemingway, but not as a person. My favorite person is Libba Bray, but not necessarily as an author. I read primarily YA and middle grade (Books of Wonder is a children’s book store), and the occasional feminist adult fic.  My reviews and recommendations will primarily be YA, holler.

I’ll post a normal pic of myself, idk, when one exists.

(That’s my cat, Casper.  Casper the Friendly Cat.  He’s probably the most important thing about me tbh)

Made a note on my manuscript while slightly drunk last night, looked at it this morning and all it says is “#foreshadowing”

We’ll get back to Mary Anning later. 

Is Kelis’ milkshake song a gift to humanity, or what?

This is just to say that there’s a number of ways Rowling could’ve made her Magical North America work without causing real harm to a lot of real people. That would be for her to have treated American peoples — all of us — with the same respect that she did European. Pretty sure she would never have dreamt of reducing all of Europe’s cultures to “European wizarding tradition”; instead she created Durmstrang and Beauxbatons and so on to capture the unique flavor of each of those cultures. It would’ve taken some work for her to research Navajo stories and pick (or request) some elements from that tradition that weren’t stereotypical or sacred — and then for her to do it again with the Paiutes and again with the Iroquois and so on. But that is work she should’ve done — for the sake of her readers who live those traditions, if not for her own edification as a writer. And how much more delightful could Magic in North America have been if she’d put an ancient, still-thriving Macchu Picchu magic school alongside a brash, newer New York school? How much richer could her history have been if she’d mentioned the ruins of a “lost” school at Cahokia, full of dangerous magical artifacts and the signs of mysterious, hasty abandonment? Or a New Orleanian school founded by Marie Laveau, that practiced real vodoun and was open/known to the locals as a temple — and in the old days as a safe place to plan slave rebellions, a la Congo Square? Or what if she’d mentioned that ancient Death Eater-ish wizards deliberately destroyed the magical school of Hawai’i — but native Hawai’ians are rebuilding it now as Liliuokalani Institute, better than before and open to all?

N. K. Jemisin

http://nkjemisin.com/2016/03/it-couldve-been-great/#sthash.YYqbnjzj.dpuf

(via absintheabsence)

MY PRECIOUS! So excited to find out what's happening in Feyre and Tamlin's world.

Not familiar with this AMAZING Fantasy Young Adult Series? Check out my review for A COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES here:

http://readitrealgood.com/2015/10/30/a-court-of-thorns-and-roses/

May can't come soon enough ❤️

We’re so thrilled to reveal the covers for Sarah J. Maas’s A COURT OF MIST AND FURY! Share it if you love it!

Exciting news yesterday from Andrea Beaty, David Roberts and Abrams Kids! The newest book in the fabulous Rosie Revere, Engineer and Iggy Peck, Architect series has been revealed. :)  She’s ADA TWIST, SCIENTIST!

Woo Hoo! for science and Woo Hoo! for two African American kids! 

On a Chris Haughton kick today. Cannot wait for his new book, Goodnight Everyone,  in the fall. <3

Chris Haughton’s beautiful storybook Shh! We Have A Plan was recently transformed into a live theatre production by Cahoots NI. We were lucky enough to make the backdrop animations, including these little fellows.

[Publishing] is a world where writers of color are damned if they do and damned if they don’t—we often find ourselves either being asked to “emphasize” (read: exoticize) our identities (“I love your writing about race,” one editor told me. “Do you have anything else like that?”) or pretend our difference doesn’t exist, to pretend our trauma doesn’t exist, to pretend that the audience we’re looking back at isn’t 90 percent made of white men. We’re pulled in so many directions, it’s a wonder we still have the energy to produce creative work. “Indict us!” the white audience shouts. “Comfort us! Teach us!” It’s an enormous amount of pressure. Sometimes, it can be embarrassing. In the words of Jay Z, “Can I live?”

Morgan Parker in Equity in Publishing: What Should Editors Be Doing? (via richincolor)