There are contexts in which the term 'luscious' is of prime appeal and represents something central to the experience, e.g. mangoes.
I am just not sure that it is a word, culled from a review (and have we not heard of the long practice of picking out from a review single words that might be taken as favourable, publicity department, for the use of ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Legenda Maris - fewer previously read stories than I expected, or maybe I just don't remember. V good.
JA Jance, Trial by Fire (2009) - another Ali Reynolds, I am finding these rather more-ish, and this was, I think, one of the better ones.
Elizabeth Moon, Cold Welcome: Vatta's Peace 1 (2017), picking up on a previous sequence ( Read more... )

Extreme sport in Tooting: Ultra-running is one of the fastest growing sports, usually taking place in remote, scenic landscapes. Not a running track in London. Will competitors reach nirvana? I'm trying to resist the Tooting jokes based on the preferability of running in circles.
Yet another, not exactly condemned to repeat it, but review of book ( Read more... )

Have we been getting Jane Austen wrong for all these years?: Kelly does not seem to have read any of the many Austen scholars and critics who would have shown her that some of her discoveries are not quite unprecedented. She might also have had some salutary encounters with those who have a different case to put.
....
Kelly is powerfully struck by ( Read more... )

Including being IT Support for partner and new computer - which is, yay, connected to the Internetz. This also involved me in seeing if I could convert some Very Old Files so that they could be used in Libreoffice: I succeeded in doing this and later discovered that the process had done Something Weird to my default view in Word (now fixed).
I had ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Doctor DOA - whoa, cliffhanger!
Ruth Rendell, Dark Corners (2015) - I have just never been madly keen on Rendell writing as Rendell but one-off non-Wexford novels - I can see that they are good, and well-written and so on, but they just don't really do it for me. This was okay. Just about everybody is nasty, though mostly in ( Read more... )

I.e. for various reasons I have been dithering over a review I'm writing, and managed to procrastinate all last week for various reasons, but I did actually start the thing today, which as usual feels like a massive advance even if I'm only up to paragraph 3, it is the step on from pacing up and down wringing my hands and emitting cries of dooooom ( Read more... )

O dear yes, this rang a bell: the personality trait they call “the need for drama”, or NFD. I'm not sure those agree/disagree sentences cited are necessarily diagnostic, but I have definitely known people (e.g. former friend 'Q') who had to have a lot of ongoing soap-opera in their lives.
I do think it's not necessarily a binary thing, though what ( Read more... )

An email from the editors of a volume in which you have a chapter saying that the external reviewers for the publisher think it's all good and doesn't need more work.
Yay.
Slightly less yay, being asked to step up for a History in the Pub talk with a month's notice.
On the subject of the review I am writing, am currently at the 'walking up and down ( Read more... )

What I read
Kathleen Jowitt, Speak Its Name (2016) about university, religion, and sexual identity, and very good indeed.
Diane Duane, Games Wizards Play (2016) - for a change they're not saving the world or the entire universe, but after a slow start, the narrative tension builds.
On the go
Laurell K Hamilton, Dead Ice (2015), which is fairly ( Read more... )