Kate > Recent Status Updates

Immediately besotted with this voice, and the town shenanigans are pure Confederate-Stars-Hollow silliness

Eeeeee zombies!! ....or cheeky lepers, whatevs. But this is such rollicking fun.

And right after my Madeleine Thien fiasco, I come across Ken Liu's "The Literomancer," which is kind of a moving, light-of-touch masterclass on how to do that illuminating modern Chinese (and Taiwanese, and American-colonial) history through the etymological-philosophical unspooling thang. Step one: be literate in Chinese. Booker panelists fearing genre fiction cooties are missing out...

WTF is even happening right now. My only consolation is that Flora Poste, if she'd rolled up at Rose Cottage instead of Cold Comfort Farm, and was prevented from sensibly running for the hills, would also be a gibbering bewildered wreck at this point. (Petty note: ugh with the dialect spellings, so irritating; eps when the book's actually v good on class.)

Entertaining, but gosh it's getting very hobbyhorsical about Teh Evils of Wheat. Does make me wish I knew more about archaeology, bc Harari's few ventures into history have so far been pretty dodgy, which makes me sideeye everything else.

NGL, picked this up purely on the strength of Evie Wyld's excellent Guardian piece on rereading 'I Capture the Castle,' but so very glad I did. After a recent diet of lacklustre Booker longlisters, this is proper 5-star writing.

This is SO CLEVER. Does Jo Walton's Tooth&Claw trick with Trollope, but with Dickens and vice/sin/filth and nails the meta didactic-sensationalist tensions. And it's a cracking pacy read, too.

Between the cheesy (and often plain illiterate) Confucious-say Chineeeeeesy bits and the blatant prize-baity litfic tropes, I'm near quitting.... but have heard the last section is by far the best. argh.

Ouch, two CLUNKING great Chinese errors obvious even to my inexpert self. Feels rather disrespectful -- if you can't be arsed to take a minute to crack a basic dictionary, maybe don't treat another script as orientalist decorative twiddles?

Ghüs!

Hmm, is it intentional that all the various 'witness' voices sound exactly alike? I hope so, bc otherwise enjoying it

American Bake-Off watchers have pointed out this apparently British baking quirk to me recently :D "Since the late middle ages the English had been obsessed with currants, raisins and sultanas, and competition with the Venetians for access....caused many ugly accidents. English merchants intruded themselves so successfully into the Ionian isles that they were soon carrying off the greater part of its dried fruit."

Still petting my signed frontispiece *pets*

and finally, we're in AD! Savouring every dense chapter.

This is so good. “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighbourhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

"But why always Smith?" Middlemarch shoutout in the middle of a sex scene, so typical of this sparkling novel <3

so far so meh... guess that's what happens when you go up against Kathryn Davis by starting off with the story of the girl who trod on a loaf

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-vC...

guess I'm a cheap shipper, because all it really took was one boozy night and a sweary game of Worms to get me all platonic!RobxCassie4EVA. (The ace teamwork and trashtalk are just icing.)

Oh FFS Virginia, don't even go there

Generally enjoying the rather proudly old-fashioned quality of this, but it does lead to some preposterous pronouncements: "You should never begin reading George Eliot with Middlemarch, nor Trollope with The Way We Live Now". O RLY.

should I be concerned that Helen Ambrose's sunny shipdeck philosophy'n'embroidery thing is my idea of heaven?

IN LOVE. Voice Oh!