Rhonda With A Book

This week I’m joined by Bre, also known as the Loc’d Booktician, for a reader chat. Bre is a BookTuber and Bookstagrammer who has created a spooky October reading challenge called Black-Oween-Athon. She gives a little insight into how and why she created this readathon, and we of course talk about current reads, favorite books, and the book that turned Bre into a reader for life.

I’m back after a much-needed break, and I have some fun content planned for the rest of October. This week, I’m revisiting a piece I wrote back in June, attempting to answer the question, What do we want in a literary adaptation? Listen to the end for some of my Spooky Season adaptation recommendations!

For this week’s Reader Chat, I got to talk to the cohost of Fictional Hangover Podcast, Amanda Garrison. Amanda has previously worked in several roles in public libraries, including as a teen librarian and an early literacy coordinator, so we had to geek out over libraries together for a bit. We also discuss the joys of Choose Your Own Adventure books. 

I’m joined for this week’s Reader Chat by Ayana, who you may know from The Vintage Guidebook blog and social media. We of course talked about vintage fashion and costuming, but since this IS a book podcast, we had to bring reading into it, too! From Jane Austen, to fashion history books and sewing guides, to the Dear America series we read as kids. Ayana also gives her perspective on staying grounded and loving yourself in our current times.

I spent A LOT of time on TikTok this summer, specifically on BookTok, and I made some friends! This week some of my fellow BookTokers tell us about their favorite books they read over the summer. I also dig a little into the big issue BookTok has been discussing recently: diversifying our reading!

My conversation with Claire last week about Midnight Sun and Twilight reminded me of some previous thoughts I’ve had on the series, so I dug out a couple of essays I wrote about the first book waaaay back in the day. I also wanted to address an issue that Claire and I alluded to but didn’t elaborate on: the problematic content in the books that many have called out as misogynist and racist. So let’s discuss that!

This week's post is from January of 2019, but I thought it seemed relevant now, particularly in light of the recent controversies of this year’s Hugo Awards ceremony. N.K. Jemisin won the Hugo for best novel three years in a row, starting in 2016, for the books in her Broken Earth Trilogy. In this essay, I discuss Jemisin's short story "The Ones Who Stay and Fight," and the story it was inspired by, Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas." 

As J. K. Rowling is in the news again recently, though not for anything book-related, I thought it was a good time to revisit this piece from January about why I am not on board with Harry Potter.