a really very short story about the wives now on Substack open.substack.com/pub/ilonayaz...
Katherine, Anne, Jane, Anne, Katherine, Katherine
a very short story
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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse
@missadadoom.bsky.social
works in publishing, translates Russian, reads, writes, edits, naps, snarks and does drop-in editorial consultancy (eg writer therapy) The Taking Cure. Find me on Substack! New book The Village at the Edge of Noon: (Buffy x The Witcher) + comedy + scares
Miss Ada Doom's Reviews from the Woodshed: three goes of a mind unravelling, like a hotel whose top floors are made of bats. Labyrinthine, mesmerising, tastily sharp - until you realise the author has left the building and it’s all bats. Volume one, three out of four bats. #booksky #gormenghast
Miss Ada Doom's Reviews from the Woodshed: we're all wandering in a mind-swamp of our own making and @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social doesn't owe you an explanation. Dunno what it is but we sure know how it feels, like the wrong-way-up tower haunting my dreams. Three and a hoof out of four cows. #booksky
The sixteen and the thirteen-year-old are watching Twelve Angry Men. Earlier they were cackling over a moronic TikTok. Every time I worry, I’m raising rot-brained social media addicts, they remind me I’ve already raised them as scatter-gun-cultured weirdos.
My local cafe is using these exquisitely bound Reader’s Digest hardbacks as set dressing, and the owner is amused to find out I can read a digested novel in the time it takes me to have 2 slow cups of coffee. #booksky
a perfect visual representation of what drain-the-swamp was always aiming for
Seth Abramson@sethabramson.bsky.social · 2mo agoSay it with me (and hundreds of nonpartisan historians, as per their latest professional assessment): The. Worst. President. In American history. By far.
Miss Ada Doom (collected) Reviews From the Woodshed: The Long Reads #booksky #review substack.com/@ilonayazhbi...
Miss Ada Doom Reviews some long books: including Vengeful, Conjugal, Labyrinthine, Courtly and Epistolary
A Reviews From the Woodshed special edition
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Joy is weird snacks snd a friend who know you you well enough to supply them.
Miss Ada Doom Reviews From the Woodshed: James Clavell's Shogun - stranger in a strange and highly-civilised land where part of the civilising influence is the foundational proximity of cavalierly dispensed death. Pilot means navigator, Jesuits tricksy. Three and a half out of four cows. #booksky
Miss Ada Doom Reviews From the Woodshed: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy - a million pages about India's Partition smuggled into a short story about an indecisive girl and her interfering mother. Authorial brio noted. Three and a half holy cows out of four cows. #booksky #bookreview #fiction #review
I went to a book event yesterday in a Bloomsbury square in the pouring rain - and they had this bed for a Jilly Cooper photo-op. Someone said, I don’t know why more people aren’t taking their picture on it. And I was like, because you forgot to put Aidan Turner in it. #rivals #womensprize
LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Ian McEwan's Atonement: Oscar Wilde had it right — the good end happily, but only in fiction. Three out of four cows. #booksky #bookreview
LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: Come back, Godot, all is forgiven. And take these wastrels with you when you go. Three out of four cows. #booksky
ET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code: Jesus — excuse me, let's just call him "of Galilee" — wept. I never wanted to go to the Louvre, and my feeling has been correct, entirely. #booksky #bookreview
my friend's email cut off at Hi Ilona - - I've just learned that I'll be a f And for a moment I died, thinking it was going to say "going to be a father." problems of the middle-aged
Mr C is on a field trip: “My B&B is opposite the Emily Dickinson house, now museum, in Amherst. I expect you know her work?” Closed today, but I can still wander around town listening to her (somewhat gloomy) poetry on Spotify”
80% of your proposed line edits are an instant yes, 20% are no one knows this text like me and I will die on this hill
Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth - decades of building a medieval cathedral, and with the assorted goings-on, a miracle it didn’t take centuries. Gripping melodrama, lots of buttresses. Three out of four cows. #booksky #bookreview #follett
LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Mario Puzo's The Godfather: Who doesn't love a family business. Even when tempers flare. Even when it's not a farm. Badly written and entirely page-turning. Two and a half out of four cows. #booksky #bookreview
LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle - you’ll never again eat a sausage you haven’t made yourself. And something about unions. Two out of four sows, not cows, just this once. #booksky #bookreview
LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx - Victorian novel pastiche with added structural labyrinth and a tangled bloodlines plot to make Jarndyce and Jarndyce bleed from the ears. Enjoyed until exhaustion. #booksky
AI translation can compress meaning and port it across like a translator: it can’t transport the experience because it experiences nothing. It can’t re-engineer the body’s somatic response to the text because it feels nothing. It can’t communicate the knowing of a text, because it knows fuck all.
Katy Derbyshire@katyderbyshire.bsky.social · 3mo agoI am in the paper, talking translation. Thanks to @philipoltermann.bsky.social for covering the topic (human vs large language model). www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
LET ME BE BRIEF: Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): E Taylor’s Angel: unlikeable girl grows up into unlikely novelist, marries unpleasant man, reaps all unattractive seeds sowed. Lesson in there somewhere, whether for novelists or for lady novelists, I couldn’t say. #booksky
The puppy has eaten a paperback. Fitzcarraldo! With flaps! My occasional literary agony aunt column is up on Substack. #booksky #puppy #agonyaunt #dogs #fitzcarraldo open.substack.com/pub/ilonayaz...
Larks in the Woodshed: Dear Mrs. Shadowfax (an occasional literary advice column)
On the literary consolations of owning a monster
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My Chernobyl anniversary isn’t April 26. Is the 28th - the day I got locked outside, seventy miles away, and watched the biggest raindrops I’ve ever seen fall from a violet-silver-green cloud that was gone in five minutes. #chernobyl open.substack.com/pub/ilonayaz...
A Sky So Blue It Hurt Your Eyes
Forty years after Chernobyl, my private anniversary
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open.substack.com/pub/ilonayaz... I have a Substack: much like early-career Jesus - a few things to say not many followers yet… #translation #culture #reading
So Farewell, Then, Harlequin Historicals - When Men Were Steeds and Women Were Hair
On learning that genre fiction is a craft, not a formula
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