iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews From the Woodshed: Pilot crashes in desert, hallucinates love and tenderness. Surreal word salad, with pictures - never liked deserts at night, myself. Elephant inside python illustration a triumph of something, the rest revoltingly sentimental. Two out of four cows. #booksky

061

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I've had it with cafe culture: ilonayazhbinchavasse.substack.com/p/the-art-of...

000

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Oh, no. The man who made Transsexual Transylvania a viable tourist destination, and could deflower fantasy virgins with just the power of his voice as Darkness. Rest in quiverings, fabulous Tim Curry. #timcurry #rockyhorror

040

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Miss Ada Doom's Reviews From the Woodshed: Eye-wateringly thorough meander across the OS map of Oxfordshire, with Tom Bombadil for your reward. Keep the ring, the cows need milking. Deus ex machina wizard, eagles. Three out of four cows, half a cow docked for Bombadil. #booksky #tolkien #lotr

040

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

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

030

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

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

030

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

my substack feed is all writers asking how to get an agent, writers writing how they got an agent, agents taking about writing and agenting and everyone teaching non-agents how to write or be agented. I just write about translating and do snark reviews.

010

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

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.

010

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

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

040

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

a perfect visual representation of what drain-the-swamp was always aiming for

000

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

a great visual representation of what drain-the-swamp was always aiming for

040

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Right?! The Eastern European in me is gleefully rubbing hands. My husband usually brings me things like snack-packed chicken feet and candy-coated crabs. French waitresses goggle when I confidently demand andouillette. Yes. Madame knows what it is.

000

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Joy is weird snacks snd a friend who know you you well enough to supply them.

100

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

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

030

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

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

030

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

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

000

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

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

040

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

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

030

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

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

060

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

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

000

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

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”

020

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

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

030

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

I learned this word from Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Country - I still remember dribbling my coffee as I shook with laughter.

110

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

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

091

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

yes - but the book was alarmingly readable! I had more patience with it than Miss Ada Doom, alas.

010

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

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

291

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

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

051

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

yes, but really only that song and his name (back when I lived on the US East Coast)

010

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

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

020

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

or the apocryphal “Angry Raisins”.

010

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Louche, bored aristocrats plot and confess sexual escapades in that most secret medium, letters. Fun, until everyone punished or dead or married off or exiled. France, meanwhile, runs out of paper. #booksky #book

060

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

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.

1166

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

020

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

If you haven’t written it, have you really read it?

010

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

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

030

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): E.M. Forster’s Howards End - an umbrella as deus ex machina, how terribly, suitably English. But what a lot of sturm and drang for a house that isn’t even a farm. #booksky #books

061

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

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...

open.substack.com

A Sky So Blue It Hurt Your Eyes

Forty years after Chernobyl, my private anniversary

000

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

Big thanks to Jacqueline Nyathi @hararereview.com for the fab review. I really love it when people enjoy reading the book almost as much as I enjoy translating it.

121

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Dostoyevsky didn’t have to, ffs. (why it’s taken me 25 years to finish a work of fiction - my own, for a change - actually two in three months - ruthless avoidance of my family) #writing #novel

010