Hello, yes, I know, I know you were wanting to hear about my favorite books for the entire year, and perhaps I will provide that in 2026. However, I have noticed to my sorrow that books publishing in the third quarter of any year are woefully overlooked in Best-of lists. As a structural matter there is not much we can do about this. Time is still finite, despite my best efforts, and the number of books published in October that you can read by December is simply fewer than the number of books published in January that you can read by…
Leave a Comment| CARVIEW |
Select Language
HTTP/2 200
vary: User-Agent,Accept-Encoding
last-modified: Tue, 13 Jan 2026 02:26:59 GMT
accept-ranges: bytes
content-encoding: gzip
host-header: c2hhcmVkLmJsdWVob3N0LmNvbQ==
x-endurance-cache-level: 2
x-nginx-cache: WordPress
cache-control: max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
pragma: no-cache
expires: Mon, 29 Oct 1923 20:30:00 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
date: Thu, 22 Jan 2026 06:28:58 GMT
server: Apache
Reading the End - before I read the middle
Skip to content
before I read the middle
Reading the End Posts
Anatomy of a Sex Scene: Heated Rivalry Edition
Published 10 Dec 2025
by
Jenny Hamilton
Heated Rivalry, AKA the gay hockey show, has been getting a lot of buzz for its explicit(-ish) sex scenes, and a lot of that buzz has been coming from viewers and critics whose experience with the romance genre is such that they are charmed by the novelty of the two protagonists calling each other by their surnames. This is to me immensely sweet, like a video of a baby having their first taste of ice cream or kimchi and falling into paroxysms of elation. I am happy for everyone who is experiencing romance genre conventions for the very first time…
Leave a Comment
A Non-Comprehensive List of Things John Wiswell’s Wearing the Lion Doesn’t Care About
Published 27 Aug 2025
by
Jenny Hamilton
Children The precipitating incident of Wearing the Lion is that Heracles, possessed by a fury that Hera has sent, kills his three sons. The specter of family annihilation is raised, only to be immediately batted aside. “This wasn’t you,” Heracles’s wife assures him. The entire engine of the plot is finding out who is responsible, because for sure we know it wasn’t Heracles. It’s kind of the fury, but she really didn’t want to do it. It’s mostly Hera, because she ordered the fury (“Take the power Zeus gave him, and make him destroy himself”), but the order was vague…
Leave a Comment
Anatomy of a Sex Scene: A Gentleman Undone, Cecilia Grant
Published 22 Jun 2025
by
Jenny Hamilton
When I started reading romance novels, about twelve years ago, I asked for recommendations and only read the romance novels that people told me were the best ones out there. This was great as a reading project — some of those early authors remain some of my faves today! — but gave me a skewed sense of the proportion of novels in the genre I should expect to truly excel. Now that I am more conversant in the genre, and reading new releases as they come out, I’m encountering a higher proportion of mediocre books. In particular, I have been feeling…
Leave a Comment
MurderBOT MurderBOT MurderBOT
Published 18 Apr 2025
by
Jenny Hamilton
As I post this, the first few episodes of the new series of Leverage: Redemption have dropped. Happy days! I cannot wait to watch them. This will get me through to the release of Andor next week, and then I’ll just be watching Leverage: Redemption and Andor episodes until Murderbot comes out. By far the most important news in this round-up is that the Murderbot TV show is going to have a show-within-the-show of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. I continue to try to temper my expectations about the Murderbot show, but I could not be more straightforwardly excited for…
Leave a Comment
Pippa Soo Demands Broadway Week: A Links Round-Up
Published 4 Apr 2025
by
Jenny Hamilton
Okay, I am trying to do this more, because there’s a lot of good stuff to read on the internet, and I want to share it with y’all. Here are some things I’ve read and enjoyed this week. Also, there are a lot of protests around the country tomorrow — if you have the time and the bandwidth, check and see if there’s one near you! Apparently my beloved, very insane Doctor Odyssey is on the bubble for renewal, so please watch it! It’s so silly and such a goofy, fun reset for my brain every week. It’s about a…
Leave a Comment
The Value of Criticism Is Thinking Together
Published 7 Jan 2025
by
Jenny Hamilton
I’ve been thinking lately about the role of book reviews and book reviewers, and happily for me, some smart people have been saying smart things on this topic. Charlie Jane Anders wrote a blog post entitled “What Are Book Critics For?”, considering the tension between critic as flaw-finder and critic as cheerleader. My pal Renay considered the incentives, and more often the disincentives, to reviewing books in an era where the boundaries between reader, reviewer, and author are porous to nonexistent. Renay writes: To have a deeper discourse, we also need to talk to and with each other, not simply…
Leave a Comment
Rounding up links, linking up rounds
Published 18 Oct 2024
by
Jenny Hamilton
Here are some things I have been reading; perhaps you, too, will enjoy them! Colonial Williamsburg has become a space for truly complex, careful conversations about American history. In America, the arts depend on charitable giving; that’s not ideal. “The Death of the Fuck”: on puritanism and sex scenes in books. I found this article fascinating — it’s about how the modern world assumes we want everything to be speedier and more efficient, but that’s not actually what we want all the time! God, I miss Blockbuster. Meredith Shiner reflects on the high holy days, Palestinian lives, and that one…
Leave a Comment
I own a lot of DVDs now: A links round-up
Published 30 Aug 2024
by
Jenny Hamilton
A couple of years ago, I decided to go all in on DVD acquisition, because I found it within myself that I did not trust the streaming ecosystem. This was a great decision, especially because it was right about the time that FYE stopped selling DVDs and they were getting rid of all their used shit for like, pennies. I got three seasons of Babylon 5 for five dollars. Total! Not each! Imagine what a great investment this will turn out to have been once I finally get into Babylon 5! It has already paid off with Voyager, the first…
Leave a Comment
Remember when I used to do link round-ups?
Published 12 Jul 2024
by
Jenny Hamilton
I thought I’d try it again. See where that gets us! Up top I’m linking two recent posts I wrote for Reactor (formerly Tor.com), one a review of Yoon Ha Lee’s new YA novel, the other an introduction to Aliette de Bodard. I stay writing things! Writing things is fun! A researcher decided to do neurofeedback experiments on indigenous children. Like, recently. We never learn anything, I s2g. Should rich people be allowed to do science? PERHAPS NOT. How classics fans (may) get funneled into alt-right content on the platform previously known as Twitter. Andrea Long Chu on Rachel Cusk.…
Leave a Comment