Jasmine Johnston, Reviewer, lives in China with her husband and several heavy books which she intends to take to Kashgar, Malaysia, New Zealand and Scotland, not necessarily in that order. She maintains a speculative weblog, which is the only site to yield both 'ratus ratus' and 'seed pearl' on Google. It now includes phonetic transcriptions of Mandarin ('pu-toong-hwa') as well as lively anecdotes involving smog and/or wonton soup ('hoon-doon').

Some favourite writers are: A.S. Byatt, G.K. Chesterton, Susanna Clarke, Annie Dillard, Dianna Gabaldon, Neil Gaiman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Guy Gavriel Kay, Stephen King, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Patricia McKillip, Alan Moore, Haruki Murakami, Blaise Pascal, J.K. Rowling, John Steinbeck, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, Jo Walton, inscrutables Plato and Heidegger, those souls whose names are not included on the Old English poems 'The Phoenix' and 'Beowulf,' and all those who contributed to the Poetic Edda.

True confessions include a propensity towards the worst kinds of Romanticism, postmodernism, and over-use of commas. All may be ascribed to a fundamental weakness for the adjective.