And it's even worse than the whole 'propose in public' thing, which is quite cringe-making enough.
Extreme proposals.
Y O Y would anyone do this? Last weekend, a marriage proposal took place in Russia that went viral. The video showed a woman being dragged from her car by numerous masked “gunmen”, slammed on the bonnet and generally terrorised, ( Read more... )

Does this, my dearios, not sound like the setup for a 1970s dystopian novel: Rubbed out: the riddle of Love Island (scroll down): [L]ist of villa rules... no books or magazines, no more than two drinks per evening, no being naked (I don’t know how that can possibly be enforced, seeing that the show is pretty much a celebration of the human body and ( Read more... )

What I read
Laurell K Hamilton, Serpentine (2018) - I was particularly taken with this one as for substantial portions, o the horror, Anita Blake has to deal with various entirely human shenanigans in connection with her fellow monster-hunter Edward aka Ted's impending wedding, also, there is a certain amount of complaint among her polyamorous ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished No Word From Winifred.
JD Robb, Connections in Death (2019), as this (temporarily?) came down to a promotional price. I'm not sure one can say that Dallas deals with gangland violence is a nice change of pace, but it was a change of crime milieu after some of the recent ones (and it really is nice to get out of the cunning and ( Read more... )

We should like to state, upfront, and this probably does not come as a surprise to our dr rdrz, that we are much of a mind with Miss Manners on the subject of promiscuous social hugging: see also, my thought on the unwelcome intrusion of doing the smoochies in professionally-related contexts.
So compared to that, going WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS? at ( Read more... )

What I read
So I finished my re-read of the Rhapsody of Blood sequence as it stands to date (I am informed that a fifth volume, at least, is in the works, which relieves me considerably, given where the fourth left us. I wrote up a plug for the series for FFfriday last week.
And that was all I actually finished.
On the go
I have to confess, I am ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Murder in the Dark, interesting entry in the series - bringing in back-story that even our protag doesn't know.
Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017): lovely, and full of things to ponder.
Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement (2018): bit of a let-down - sequel to Dear Committee-Members, ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Oxbridge Men, which I thought was a pretty sound study: possibly a bit internalist, but I suspect that women/colonials of various stripes arriving at Oxbridge (and being perceived as threatening) were more pressing concerns for the average Oxbridge undergraduate of the period than the fact that there were actually other ( Read more... )

I am entirely on board with this article: The joy of not finishing books. It is not obligatory to finish reading a book if you are not enjoying it and it has become a dreary slog, unless there is some ulterior purpose exterior to the process.
But that decision is in the reader's own hands.
I fancy, from the outcries I have already seen on Twitter ( Read more... )

What I read
Episode 10 of Tremontaine Season 4.
Jonathan Kellerman, Night Moves (2018). Alex 'Smug' Delaware was a bit less annoying in this one: but it still rather conformed to the usual pattern.
Nicola Griffith, So Lucky (2018) - not sure how one classifies this - not, she emphasises in the afterword, the auto-fiction it was originally marketed ( Read more... )