octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Oh, the problematic fave. When I was a kid this was my absolute favourite of the Narnia books. Which is mostly down to Aravis and Hwin - in my mind, this book's real title was A Horse and Her Girl. I just adored Aravis, then and now.

That being said, I don't think I've read this since I was a kid, and wow. Doing a Narnia reread now and Aravis aside, this book is pretty damn racist. And sexist, too, though not at the same level; I note that Lewis is taking yet another opportunity to diss Susan for being an adult woman. (Lucy, on the other hand, who rides to war is "as good as a man, or at any rate as good as a boy".) That's not even going into the absolute caricature that is Lasaraleen. Yeah, thanks for that, Mr. Lewis, don't think I don't see what you were doing there.

Honestly, I was pretty shocked. A lot of Narnia went over my head as a kid - I spent years reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe without realising that Aslan was meant to be Jesus, for instance - and I missed a lot here as well, too busy drooling over Pauline Baynes' illustration of Tashbaan and the tombs like a big desert Stonehenge. Reading it today and I'm giving this book serious side-eye. But I still love it, even if I can't give it five stars, and it's still my favourite of the series. For nostalgia as much as Aravis, I think. Problematic fave it is.

Interesting collection of popular essays on the history of science, covering multiple disciplines. I feel like I've read all the mathematical stuff in other of Asimov's books before so that was a little dull, but as always (for me, anyway) things improved once we got to the biology, which is my own particular scientific preference. My favourite essay was "The Lost Generation", on Mendel's pea experiments - no surprise, botany improves everything.

King John has the distinction of being the only play I've ever seen the RSC do at Stratford. It was some time ago now, and being from the other side of the world King John was the play that was playing when I visited Stratford, so King John was the play that I saw. I enjoyed it then and I enjoy it now, just having read it for the first time. I've heard it referred to as one of the worst Shakespeare plays, but frankly whenever I hear that assessment being made I can only conclude the lucky assessor has never been faced with the interminable bore that is The Comedy of Errors. Give me King John any day over that piece of idiocy.

To be honest, I don't recall a lot about seeing the play other than Constance, and the kid on top of the wall. Reading it, I'm far more aware of the politics and shifting allegiances, and I'm far more struck and amused by the wrangling of the citizen of Angiers, as he tries to get these two pain in the arse armies off the front lawn of his poor city.

I will say, however, that the extraneous matter in this edition (the introductory essay, the ending textual analysis and so forth) have done their absolute level best to suck all the pleasure from the text, so it is to the credit of the play itself that it kept my interest despite being fair suffocated by useless detail. Well, perhaps it's not useless, if you've got a burning desire to wade at length, in tiny type, through the different performance practices of every single bloody actor in history to ever take on one of the major roles in this play. Suffice to say, if this is the presentation typical of the New Cambridge Shakespeare I shall be doing my utmost to avoid their editions in future.

This gets an extra point for the idea behind it - I'm kindly predisposed to anyone who uses Blake as inspiration - but the execution is clumsy. It's as subtle as a brickbat, basically, and the bad guys fall into stereotype. The illustrations also didn't do too much for me. Mostly they just felt indistinct, though as I tend to prefer cleaner lines, that's a matter of personal preference more than anything else.

One of my absolute favourite books ever. I devoured this series as a kid - it was my Harry Potter, basically - and this volume is I think the best of them. Well, this and The Grey King. I spent many, many hours as a child grappling with how truly terrible the Light could be. Hawkins gets screwed over good, it's really kind of monstrous what happens to him. And as a fantasy-devouring kid, who mostly came from a background of Narnia and Middle-earth, where good was good and bad was bad and there was a giant yawning gap between, The Dark Is Rising was a painful revelation. It blew my tiny mind, is what I'm saying, and I loved it because of that.

And there's the whole Christmas nostalgia thing, too. Coming from the Antipodes where December is sunshine and warmth, the whole midwinter ritual is strangely attractive.

My liking for this book grows every time I read it - and I've read it a lot. First time round, as a kid, I enjoyed it but it didn't hold a candle to my adoration of The Grey King, and as an adult I still think that it comes behind both that book and The Dark Is Rising. Yet Greenwitch has its own charm - in the atmosphere, in putting Jane front and centre... and because, in many ways, it's the most human of the five books. Merriman and Will are there to help, but the real victory comes from simple empathy with no expectation of reward, from quiet consideration of others.

The Light wins this round because Jane is kind, essentially, and each time I read this book I appreciate that just a little bit more.

Not one of my favourite Narnia books, but still a pleasant read. I think my favourite part of it is the Wood Between the Worlds, just for the images it conjures up. Also, the bit with Diggory healing his mother I always find affecting, as it strikes me as wish-fulfilment on Lewis' part, for if I recall correctly his own mother died when he was very young and it affected him dreadfully.

Every time I read this book, however, I can never get past Aslan making two animals of every species Talking Animals. Which is fine as far as it goes, but who do their children breed with? Which is a dreadfully practical question, I know, and Lewis seems to have a little grudge against practicality (both Jadis and Uncle Andrew are both referred to be being particularly practical, and let's not forgot Susan Pevensie, the most practical of the kids who visit Narnia and what happened to her). Nonetheless, that part always pulls me up.

A book of two halves. I've had it on my shelf for years, but have never got around to reading it before this. Honestly, I was put off. I visited Glastonbury some years ago and frankly it gave me the creeps; I was under the (mistaken) idea that this book was some sort of new age crystal-waffle. Don't know why, although that - and the massive prevalence of infants, their prams clogging the footpaths - was one of my main impressions of the town if not the tor, so it passed over unfairly to Ashe I think.

I was very interested to find the first half a solidly researched history of the place. Really it was quite fascinating, reading the author sift out fact from fiction in the historical record and trying to put together a social, cultural and religious timeline of the site. I'm also quite prepared to believe that there's some sort of formed maze on the tor itself; that seems a reasonable conclusion even if we don't know the details of why and what for. So far I was impressed.

Then the second half of the book, and that's where he lost me. I read the book because I was interested in the Glastonbury site itself and suddenly Ashe isn't talking about Glastonbury any more, it's all central Asian travel histories and Hopi mythology and it's just too far afield for me, the connections too tenuous. The scepticism he employed in the first half of the book, when dealing with Geoffrey of Monmouth and so on, seemed to disappear. (I, on the other hand, was at this point sceptical enough for the both of us.)

In summary: really interesting first half, unconvincing second.

The giant of the fantasy genre. I've read and reviewed the three books separately, but I've also in times past read this giant brick of a tome more than once, so I'm adding it now for completeness' sake, and noting that this is one of the few giant epic fantasy tomes in existence that doesn't irritate me. There's probably waffle in there, but none I want to cut out. I just love everything about it, but my favourite parts, I think, are Eowyn and the Witch King, the Houses of Healing, and most of all Sam - with the one bright star in Mordor (which has always been the pre-eminent moment of eucatastrophe in literature for me) and him coming home at the end. Also Gollum, who is monstrous and pitiful at once, Shelob, Gandalf and the Balrog, the march of the Ents... and churlish as this may be, Elves who do not sing awful little fairy songs like they do in a certain prequel. Tra-la-la-lally, Elrond, really.

I don't suppose any book is ever perfect, but my emotional attachment to LOTR over-rides all else. I can (and have) read it again and again, and my enjoyment only increases.

I read and reviewed, separately, the three books in this series earlier this year so I'm just adding this now for completeness. These were some of the defining books of my childhood - not the most important, but certainly up there. The first two especially I thought were excellent, but I was then (and remain now) a little disappointed with the last by comparison, and by the lack of girl characters in general. Still, the overwhelming creepiness of the Cap, of the Tripods and the way that they chewed though servants in their dreadful cities, was just so well done I never forgot it.