Unapologetic Reviews

You Wanna Be on Top? by Sarah Hartshorne is a sharp, funny, and at times, disturbing memoir about her time on America’s Next Top Model , specifically cycle 9 . I came to this book with surprisingly little memory of that season. I watched Top Model as it aired, over a decade ago. Living outside the US now means there is no easy, legal way to revisit it; the show exists mostly as cultural residue, Tyra quotes and vague recollections. Sarah is a great storyteller. I listened to the audiobook, just over seven and a half hours long, and finished it in about three days because I kept finding excuses to press play. Sarah narrates it herself, and her stand up background shows immediately. The timing is precise; the delivery casual but deliberate; the jokes land cleanly. At times it feels less like an audiobook and more like a very long, very personal stand up set. I laughed out loud more than once. But this is not just a funny book. That is where it gets interesting. There is a recurring t...

I read Towards Zero (1944) as part of the 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and I listened to it as an audiobook narrated by Hugh Fraser. Going in, I remembered this story as a Miss Marple mystery, which turned out to be misleading. That version comes from the television adaptation. In its original form, Towards Zero does not feature Miss Marple at all. Instead, this is a Superintendent Battle novel, one of Christie’s lesser-known recurring detectives. Knowing that helped recalibrate my expectations, but it also highlighted how much my memory of the story was shaped by the adaptation. Certain beats were familiar, others felt different, and at times I wasn’t sure whether I was remembering the book or the television version. The setup itself is solid. A group of people gathers in a coastal setting, old relationships resurface, tensions simmer, and everything builds towards an inevitable act of violence. Christie’s idea here is that murder does not begin at the moment of the cri...

At Bertram’s Hotel ( 1965 ) is a Miss Marple novel that I read as part of the 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and in several ways it felt quite unique compared to the other books I read this year. This is very firmly a Miss Marple story. She is present from the beginning to the end, and that alone made it feel refreshing after so many novels where the detective appears late or feels almost incidental. This is also one of Christie’s later novels, and you can feel that immediately. The book is steeped in a quiet sense of unease about modernity. It looks back at an older London , an older way of life, and contrasts it with a world that is changing fast and not always for the better. That sense of nostalgia, mixed with suspicion, runs through the entire story and gives it a very distinct atmosphere. I knew this story quite well going in, because it is one of my favourite episodes from the Miss Marple television series . That actually helped, because the novel itself is very diff...