Wednesday has had a haircut

What I read

Finished Poor Caroline which is one of those novels - ?I think they went on being a thing beyond the period when this was written? - where you have several ill-assorted people's stories through them being brought together through some reason cutting across their usual associations, in this case, via the eponymous Caroline who is a dotty and determined ageing spinster who is trying to set up a Christian film company. And everyone has their own motivations, and so on, which have little or nothing to do with any stated purpose. Not a top Holtby but has its moments.

Re-read of NK Jemisin, The City We Became (Great Cities, #1) (2020) and The World We Make (Great Cities #2) (2022) - slightly less whelmed by the first perhaps but still gripped by the second.

Started to re-read KJ Charles, Copper Script (2025) and realised why it had not made much impression upon me. Well off-form - clunky, sluggish and has a lot of one of my pet peeves, very distinctively of-the-present-day expressions and word-usage in a period setting. Decided not to continue.

On the go

Foluso Agbaje, The Talk of the Party (2026) a mystery/thriller about wealthy socialite family in Lagos. Just started.

Up next

Have not yet got to Literary Review.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

Most Popular Tags

aaaargh - 355 uses
academic - 643 uses
advice - 248 uses
age - 267 uses
animals - 338 uses
annoyance - 462 uses
archives - 448 uses
art - 362 uses
biography - 418 uses
books - 1330 uses
cooking - 1122 uses
crime - 244 uses
facile-preconceptions - 371 uses
fantasy - 272 uses
feminism - 648 uses
fiction - 278 uses
food - 316 uses
gender - 914 uses
health - 491 uses
history - 936 uses
homosexuality - 301 uses
internet - 258 uses
life - 260 uses
links - 361 uses
litcrit - 329 uses
litfic - 753 uses
london - 382 uses
marriage - 297 uses
masculinity - 546 uses
meme - 955 uses
mysteries - 527 uses
nature - 305 uses
politics - 265 uses
reading - 1226 uses
recipes - 987 uses
relationships - 403 uses
religion - 354 uses
research - 381 uses
romance - 412 uses
sex - 429 uses
sff - 748 uses
social history - 495 uses
thrillers - 376 uses
travel - 476 uses
tropes - 341 uses
unexamined-assumptions - 548 uses
victorians - 319 uses
women - 968 uses
work - 327 uses
writers - 244 uses

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lcohen

i made it through "copper script" and i for sure don't make it through every book i start, so it's got that going for it--i think for me, it suffered from great expectations. there are some authors where i just don't expect that much but KJ Charles can be so excellent and that one isn't excellent.

oursin

The bar is set high and this one fell short.

It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog