Naomi > Recent Status Updates

I know this is a "For the rest of us" book, but the author writes like his readers are thick.

Hmm. The first one wasn't edgy or gory, but I don't remember it being quite this saccharine either...

I tried to read this when it first came out and couldn't get into it. All these years later... I still can't. By that I mean, I literally can't remember where I'm even up to, and there seems to be zero plot so far. I'd think there was something mentally the matter with me, except this happened the last time I tried. But reviews are raving...?

Ohhh kudos to JKR. I've read my fair share of crime fiction (though admittedly I'm not into the really gory, splattery stuff) and this was the first crime scene/corpse description in a long time that's made me grimace in disgust, even 24 hours after I last read it. This had a sloooooooow start, and I still don't care about Charlotte or Lucy, but I'm properly in now.

Okay, but I kind of need Rowling to write Bombyx Mori for real now, because it sounds insane in a good way.

Still struggling through this one. It's not bad, but it's not particularly interesting either. The conclusion seems... foregone?

Hate to say it, but I'm not really enjoying this one. So far just an endless cat-and-mouse sequence of "She's tired! Oh wait, she's less tired now. He's about to collapse! Oh wait, he can hold out for a bit longer..." interspersed with a backstory that seems almost entirely peopled with cartoonishly evil villains. I hope it improves. King writes small boys well; he writes small girls as whiny pains in the ass.

Ugh. I was thinking how much better this would be in 3rd person *before* I got to the line "My eyes are focused on a woman" - something NO FIRST-PERSON NARRATOR SHOULD OR WOULD SAY. I doubt I'll get this to 10%.

Taking me forever, but it's not a quality issue - I'm reading a second-hand paperback that's very hard to hold open with one hand, so it's exacerbating my carpal tunnel. Ebooks forever.

Oh, this is great stuff. This, like work by Stephen King (odd comparison, I know) feels... smooth. Confident. Like I'm not about to hit a speed bump of incompetency in the middle of a paragraph that will make me wince, which happens a bit with other writers.

I think every book has a flavour or is like a dish, and to me, classic King is like a plate of carbonara: satisfying/filling, savoury, comforting, and with occasional extra tasty morsels while being consistent overall. It really is a shame so much of his post-cocaine, post-accident work is bland or full of Covid/political stuff you could break a tooth on.

1980s Stephen King: Little boys are amazing. Little girls are petty, bratty, annoying little bitches that you can't help wanting to strangle.

Wonder how his daughter felt, growing up...

So many of the characters in this short story collection are widowers that I just Googled to double check that Tabitha King is still alive (as of May 10, 2025, she is).

Makes sense, I suppose. When you're a young parent, your worst nightmare is your kids dying (King's "dead toddler period" in the early 80s). Now his stories are about the horrors of being old - being widowed, your body breaking down, etc.

Covid really did a number on Uncle Stevie's psyche, didn't it? I mean, it's perhaps unreasonable for him to never mention it at all, but it's like a refrain he keeps going back to like a dementia patient who's spiralling.

I'm becoming increasingly emotionally invested in Freeman's work, which I initially considered to be pleasant but a little unmemorable. But he had a gift for creating endearingly vulnerable male characters, and in a period where that vulnerability wasn't so common - here, Andrew Barton and his struggles with confidence after being disfigured in a chance accident.

I'm afraid that once a mystery novel gives me a map - or worse, gives me a description that tries to get me to imagine one - I'm done. Can't do it.

It's rare and refreshing to read a Golden Age (sort of) mystery in which the victim died not by poison or a single stab or some other aesthetic method of death, but by having his face blown off with a shottie.

In this deeply cynical age, it's hard for fiction depicting a middle-aged man making friends with an eight-year-old girl to hit the sweet note originally intended, but this works. That's a time-travelling credit to Upfield.

Oh, this book *rocks*. I can see why American Evangelicals hate this guy: he's their bogeyman, the educated theological "liberal", and he's right. Reddit is full of conservative Christians scrambling to explain that no, them Canaanites *deserved" that genocide with exactly the arguments he describes.

I've enjoyed all Ruth's previous books, but I'm struggling with this one and feel she's run out of material. I fully support her not writing sensationalist crap, but "I met a guy who said the Pommy Arms is haunted and another guy who said it isn't" is way too vague to interest anyone. It's hard to concentrate reading a whole bunch of these sorts of reports in a row.

Upfield's stories are less detective novels and more adventure stories, but that doesn't matter. His settings and, especially, his action sequences are glorious. This one includes a chase on horseback that's absolutely gripping.

"Boney witnesses a monoplane drop a bomb on a police car" is quite the unusual opener.

I think this is the first Maigret book I've read so far that's made any reference to the Nazis and the fact that wartime Paris fell to Nazi rule. I've wondered what Maigret did during that time - it's never come up, though he would have become a police officer before the war.

Part of what I love about these books is how interested Upfield was in the world around him. The smallest details are observed and recorded, whether it's rabbit fences or tuna fishing, and it always feels so vibrant & authentic. His dialogue probably feels cliched or exaggerated to many modern readers, but I've no doubt many Australians really spoke that way in the 1930s.

Most of the principle female characters are opining that a nine-year-old boy, who spent his toddler years in a prison compound in WWII Malaysia held by the Japanese and whose parents both just died in a horrific road smash, is a tiresome, whining little attention whore for being sick during a picnic. I have no idea if I'm supposed to agree with them or if this is an inverted "Who Killed the Assholes" plot...