Not in love with Ali

I finally got around to trying Ali, which I bought in the Zoya BOGO sale back a couple of months ago, and well, you can see the answer in the title. I don't love it. There's nothing wrong with it, except that it's too coral for me. Here it is in the indirect sunlight of my bedroom: 4 coats, no top coat, not at all cleaned up, and still with a hint of visible nail line (and slightly lobstery fingers in spots, darnit).

*For those who are interested (because somebody inevitably will be!), I will address the question of what I was reading at the bottom.

It doesn't look bad on me. But just the same I decided to see what putting Chloe on top of it would do, and it did tone the orange tones down just a bit. But not enough to make me love it.

Hmm, if you go by those pictures, Chloe made it look more orange. I don't know if that's a difference in the sunlight outside between yesterday and today, or if that's really the case. All these pictures were taken with the same camera and the same settings in the same spot, though. And this is two coats of Chloe, btw.

Here's a rather blurry picture with the bottle.

...and you can see that it does look more orange than the bottle does. But as I said, that may be Chloe.


*About what's on my Kindle:
A couple of months ago I picked up a paperback in Sam's Club for about $5 that had two romance novels by an author called Mary Balogh. I used to be a habitual reader of romance novels (and particularly Regency romances, which is what these are) but that was a while ago and I eventually got bored with them and mostly stopped reading them. But it turned out that I liked these, and it also turns out that this woman has written a ton of them over the past 20+ years. The edition I picked up at Sam's is a reissue of two of her older novels and there are at least 10 or so of them available in pairs, like this. (They were originally issued as series romances, like this one, apparently.) So I have been working my way through them and I am not near finished. I bet I've read at least 15 or so, because I've read most of those duo editions and several more single ones, but there are still lots left. Obviously I think she is a good writer, or I wouldn't still be reading. They tend to be a bit more angsty than your average romance novels (in some cases quite a lot more angsty - but others are quite funny), and she can write a decent sex scene without being totally corny about it, and the characters are interesting, and well, I just like them. Anyway, the one above is First Comes Marriage, which is the first in a series of five. I actually have very few of these books on my Kindle - instead I have been buying the used paperbacks from Amazon, because they're cheaper than the Kindle editions.