Hot Girls Read Podcast

Julia

As I mentioned last week, I’m in the middle of reading a rather hefty fantasy novel in French (which, if i haven’t already mentioned, I’m still perfecting my mastery of), so it’s slow going over here! Plus, I’ve been on holiday, and while there was reading by the pool being done, there were a lot of other things to be doing as well, not including reading before bed as per my usual. That said, I did want to take this chance to write about what I read on my 4 hour plane journey from Gran Canaria back to Paris. You might be thinking to yourself, 4 hours is a decent amount of time so she must have put a pretty good dent in a novel if she was using her time wisely. And you know, those 4 hours did indeed fly by as I was reading…a newspaper! Yes, a full-blown-literally-wider-than-the-Vueling-seats newspaper. As hard as it was to read a newspaper on a cramped plane, it was also the perfect plane read – the articles were the ideal length to keep me engaged but not bored, and the variety of topics kept me interested the entire flight. Now is the time to mention that it was a copy of the FT (Financial Times + the FT weekend edition including House & Home as well as Life & Arts). The fact that it included the weekend edition is important, not only because those are the bits that I was most intrigued by, but because it added 2 newspapers worth of content to the package – there were A LOT of pages being flippity flapped about on that plane.

I’ve read the FT online before, but it has been a long time since I’ve read it, or any other newspaper for that matter, in print. I didn’t love all the articles and there were more than a few that I found lacking in content and in craft, but I did appreciate the variety of subjects I could skim, from an interview with India’s Foreign Minister to a spotlight on Chilean wine. The sensation of reading a print newspaper was also a delightful, if not sometimes annoying, experience. I bobbed back and forth between feeling like a distinguished adult with serious opinions about serious things to feeling like an imposter who could barely keep all the newsleafs together (seriously, they kept falling apart). All that said, reading print newspapers is somewhat of a lost art these days and I recommend it as a travel companion. I remember back when I was a kid, I used to dislike the smell of newspapers because it was the same smell I associated with stale airplane air since so many people would read papers on the plane. These days, planes don’t seem to smell like dried ink and musky paper anymore, but I say we bring it back!

Ayesha

Last night I finally started the highly anticipated Hunger Games prequel, “Sunrise on the Reaping.” I was only two chapters in before I started crying…so we can only imagine how the rest of the book will be. “The Hunger Games” original trilogy is certainly a cult classic of our time (AKA mine and Julia’s youth). I read it when it first came out from our school library and I think almost everyone in our school read that series. To say that these books hold a special place doesn’t really cover it. 

Reading Haymitch’s story at a time of political concern (to put it in the mildest of terms) is a lot. I know, boring words, but I’m struggling to grapple with the actions of the government while reading about a government who kills children for entertainment. And that is exactly what Suzanne Collins wants us readers to feel…or so I think. It’s no surprise this was published when it was…during a time where sources of news and updates (for example TikTok) are being targeted to hide stories from the people in order to manipulate the truth. That’s censorship and propaganda. 

“It’s a television show” – Haymitch Abernathy, The Hunger Games movie