octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

The premise for this is fantastic: a disillusioned lawyer with a fridged wife (Boo! alright, that part's not so fantastic) buys his way into absolute power in a fantasy kingdom - or so he thinks. In reality, this rather privileged character is dumbfounded when the people he's bought the rule of don't want a bar of him. Or perhaps that's more of a modern interpretation, because of course he wins them all over in the end. (Fantasy as a genre does tend to have a fairly conservative base.)

The execution doesn't quite live up to the premise, however. The characterisation in particular is barely there and I would have liked to see more women in Landover (all we get is the thinly drawn love interest so lacking in personality that she might as well be all plant instead of half, and the even more thinly drawn witch, who is supposedly super powerful but in reality is subjugated and disposed of very quickly).

One wonders what Terry Pratchett would have made of this premise: a story both more cynical and hopeful and self-aware, I think.

A really very interesting biography of Katherine Mansfield - certainly far more enjoyable than the Journal by KM that I slogged through a few weeks back. It left me with a very clear picture of Mansfield's personality, which is one of the things I want most from a bio so thumbs up there.

Tomalin is chatty and opinionated in her discussion of Mansfield's life, and she doesn't flinch from her subject's more negative characteristics and behaviour. As a reader, this makes any biography far more enjoyable - reading about a paragon can be so tiresome! Mansfield is very far from a paragon - but she is interesting to read about. Recommended.

Look, far be it from me to denigrate anyone's desire to fit a system to their universe. I tend to admire the effort behind such... but my goodness, Aristotle, must you be so DULL? The thought of sitting next to you at a dinner party fills me with horror.

I understand that there's a theory of alternate universes where everything is possible in at least one of them. Therefore, in at least one universe, "philosophy" is synonymous with "pedantry". I suspect it's a universe very close to this one, for Aristotle lays out his Ethics in such painful, eye-bleeding detail that it becomes a bog. Reading this book, I was seized with the desire to travel back in time and introduce him to the flow-chart. It would have saved a lot of effort.

I've just reread this - it was one of my favourites as a kid (moreso than either of the sequels) and I still really enjoy it. It's solidly science fiction, with the Tripod invaders enforcing a new world order through mind control... but the order is calm and attractive, and the people under it are happy, for the most part. They just don't retain freedom of thought after having all their doubt and scepticism stripped from them. Without the ability to doubt, it's stagnation all the way...

I've read this several times before, and I think it's safe to say that there's a lot I don't agree with. The arguments are often ridiculous, yes. There's more strawmen there than in all the cornfields of the world put together, yes. Plato is a tiresome windbag with a strangely and monstrously obsequious level of arrogance - yes, yes, yes.

But even so, as a foundation document of Western Civilization, it's hard to beat - the influence of The Republic is just immense. And for all the book's flaws, the metaphor of the cave looms enormous and overshadows them all.

The best of the Harry Potter books, with a fairly complex story that doesn't fall prey to the bloat of the later books. It has the very great advantage of introducing both the Dementors, who are really creepy villains, and also Lupin - who is my favourite of the adult characters and in my top three overall. Plus it has Crookshanks, who I adore.

And I've never liked rats anyway.

It's odd. I reread the first Tripods book a few days ago, and while it lived up to my memory of it I'd really almost entirely forgotten the sequels. Well, as soon as I read The City of Gold and Lead I began to remember just how nastily creepy it was (and I say that in a good way). It's fascinating like a car crash is fascinating... full of dreadful things and you can see the disaster lurking but it's so morbidly interesting you can't look away.

I always felt that Fritz was the real hero of this book, and his fate gets me every time.

I thought this was excellent. The story of Marie Curie and her husband Pierre, interspersed with the consequences of their work (nuclear testing, fall out, application).

The illustrations are sufficiently weird and varied to capture interest, and I've classed this as "graphic novel" (even though it isn't novel) because of the huge influence that they have on the text. Honestly, I was more interested in the drawings than the text - although given that I'm quite familiar with the subject matter (science history is an interest of mine) that may not be the same for everyone. Still, well worth reading.

Compulsively readable, as many of King's novels are. I thought that the depiction of Rose's abusive husband Norman was particularly good, especially in the early stages. However the more he got taken over by the bull, the less scary I found him - probably because it seemed to take away his intelligence as much as his sanity. Gert was also excellent - loved her.

My major criticism is that the book is too long. Now King writes long, I know this, and I frequently enjoy that about his books. But this one just felt dragged out; I reckon he could have lost a good 150 pages and had a tighter end result.

In this collection, Hill takes the historical figure of King Offa and builds a series of modern hymns around him. Honestly, I found the idea behind this collection more appealing than the execution of it. There's a very strong (perhaps too strong) reliance on historic/modern melding - for instance, in the first hymn, Offa is "King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5..." - but this trick didn't sustain my interest. Which is a shame, as there were odd lines - my favourite concludes hymn 14 ("At dinner, he relished the mockery of drinking his family's health. He did this whenever it suited him, which was not often") - that I found bitingly entertaining. Shame they were so often smothered by effect.