Episode 220 – How Far the Light Reaches

It’s episode 220 and time for us to talk about the winner of our One Book One Podcast / Battle of the Books: How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler! We discuss content warnings, anthropomorphising sea critters, our relationships with the ocean, salps, goldfish, whales, octopus, crabs, and more!

You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast delivery system.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray 🦇 | Jam Edwards

Things We Read (or tried to…)

• How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler
• My Life in Sea Creatures: What the Ocean’s Animals can Teach us About Ourselves
• My Life in Sea Creatures: A young queer science writer’s reflections on identity and the ocean
  • I can’t actually find any edition of the book with this on the cover, though it’s frequently listed as the subtitle on various book websites. I have no idea why there are different titles.

Other Media We Mentioned

• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
• Fear of Big Things Underwater by Jacob Geller
• How a Game Lives: The Annotated Essays of Jacob Geller

Links, Articles, and Things

• Episode 215 – Battle of the Books 2025
• Gender Reveal Episode 136: Sabrina Imbler
• Sabrina Imbler on Defector
• Sharks Aren’t Fish by Hank Green
• Noisestorm – Crab Rave
• Ghost Ship warehouse fire
• Pulse nightclub shooting
• Sci-Hub

11 Steampunk Fiction Books by BIPOC Authors:

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcast chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

• To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose
• Clockwork Curandera Vol 1: The Witch Owl Parliament by David Bowles, Raúl The Third, Stacey Robinson, and Damian Duffy
• Buffalo Soldier by Maurice Broaddus
• Of Jade and Dragons by Amber Chen
• The Black God’s Drums by P. Djélí Clark
• The SEA is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia edited by Jaymee Goh and Joyce Chng
• Rebel Skies by Ann Sei Lin
• A Magic Fierce and Bright by Hemant Nayak
• Everfair by Nisi Shawl
• NewsPrints by Ru Xu
• City of Secrets by Victoria Ying

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Join us again on Tuesday, November 4th when we’ll be talking about the genre of Epic and High Fantasy!

Then on Tuesday, December 2nd we’ll be reading books from the 1980s!