octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

The best part of this was the glimpse into the future. Asimov wrote it decades ago, and wondered about the time when, in the future, humans would get a glimpse of Pluto. And we so recently have...

I think this is my favourite of the series - even the twist at the end didn't spoil it for me as it apparently has for others, but I wasn't particularly fond of that character anyway, so don't much care. And epilogues often suck; this one's no exception. But Beka has grown on me over the course of the series, and I did like the new love interest Farmer, very much. (Though anyone is an improvement over Rosto - or, apparently, the dead fiancé). I'm also a fan of Sabine and Achoo, so it was nice to have them shine so much here.

On a shallow note, that is a particularly terrible cover. Really dreadful. The arm and the head... like a horror film Frankenstein's monster.

I read and reviewed these separately, so am including the collected volumes for my own records, essentially. Overall the series gets three stars from me, as an average of what I gave the separate volumes: Terrier and Bloodhound got three stars each, and Mastiff earned four.

I found the series to be a likeable read, and I think the thing I liked about it most was the language. Pierce has developed an interesting, street-slangy vocabulary that really gave me a sense of the culture the stories were set in. It's worth reading just for that, I reckon.

Interesting and highly readable account of the Inklings group, albeit one heavily weighted towards Lewis. There's always a risk, I think, in reading about authors whose work I admire (The Lord of the Rings is one of my favourite books) - I want to think well of them, if only to reinforce my own prejudices and taste - and mostly I leave this book thinking well of the Inklings, both as a group and as individuals. There are bits where I feel much less sympathy for them than others, but I suppose that is the case with anyone.

Mostly, though, I'm left with the feeling of how extraordinary it must have been sometimes, in their meetings. Tolkien and Lewis alone would have been worth the price of admission... not that I ever would have been admitted, of course, having had the bad manners to be female, but still. I seem to have gotten LOTR out of it, and that is plenty for anyone.

One of my favourite novels! The language is so sensual and evocative, although that is hardly surprising given that this is a book all about scent. It draws you in. You know how sometimes, if you read a really good book about food you begin to daydream about running away to be a pastry chef, or a chocolatier or whatever? The first time I read this book - and my own personal copy is very worn - I remember daydreaming about running away to learn how to make perfume. But my dad had a lavender farm at the time, and I'd work there over the summers helping to distil the oil, and honestly it made me loathe the smell of lavender so that pleasant daydream died under withering practicality.

But still. The hero of this story - and I use the word loosely - is a nasty little cockroach with no redeeming features. It's almost refreshing that he's so repulsive. And he does get an ending that deserves him, though really Grenouille is a vehicle for sensory gluttony and not a lot else. I don't care, I am a glutton as well. And if Perfume does anything really, really well, it is allowing me to be gluttonous.

What a great idea for a book! I flipped straight to the entry for my birthday, then went back to the beginning to read the whole thing through. A Reader's Book of Days is stuffed with interesting little stories about authors and their books, and there's a lot that's been added to my to-read list.

My one criticism is the lack of diversity. Obviously I didn't count or make a spreadsheet or anything, so I'm guessing ratios here, but it seemed like 90+% of authors mentioned were from North America or Britain, and 70+% were men. There are a lot of great writers out there, and I would have liked to see more of a range. Instead, some of them - Ernest Hemingway, for example - really hog page space, and this can make the book seem a bit repetitive at times.

This gets two stars instead of one because I appreciate the amount of research that went into it, but how is it possible to have 400+ pages, positively stuffed with characters, and I don't give a damn about a single one of them? Seriously, I don't.

This wouldn't be such a problem if there was a plot that got me really involved with the story, but there isn't. The Brothers Grossbart, deeply unpleasant, meet up with a) people as unpleasant as themselves, or b) thinly drawn redshirts. They kill the lot, and it's rinse and repeat.

I mean, I understand that they're not meant to be heroes, and the deaths are consistently gory and repulsive, but... it put me in mind of de Sade. Some years back I read all his stuff, and for the first half hour you're shocked and disgusted and then you just get bored, like you're stuck in a Halloween joke that's gone on too long. The desire to shock is not enough to sustain a narrative.

Nearly did not finish. Had to force myself.

This is a reprint of an old story of Martin's - I originally read it many years ago in the collection "Mythic Beasts", edited by Asimov. It's slightly different there; this new edition has clearly been altered for a new (younger?) audience. Specifically, the details of Teri's gang rape have been removed, and I'm not sorry to see them go. However, the editing job around this does seem slightly clumsy - there's the odd paragraph referring to it that hasn't been altered or excised, and I wonder how it reads to those who never saw the original.

It's an interesting little story, though nothing very startling. I'm unsure if it would get the hardback and illustration treatment if Martin weren't the juggernaut that he is. That being said, it's a nice edition and the illustrations, though not to my taste, are well-done.

Of the three books in the Chronicles of Siala series, this is my favourite. As a series, it got better as it went on, I think. And this book in particular has a really very well done section when Harold is in Hrad Spein searching for the Rainbow Horn - it was eerie and creepy and really fascinating to read.

That being said, most of the characters continue as cardboard cut-outs, and the appearance of the Dryads is something of a deus ex machina, where they conveniently pop out of nowhere to save the heroes. (Have they even been mentioned in the many hundreds of pages of the series, up until that point? I don't remember, but they came across as awfully convenient...) And I grant that the Horn is powerful, but it does seem to wrap stuff up awful quick. Three books about finding the thing and getting it back to Avendoom, then what... 30, 40 pages or so and everything's all over - including the twist?

I read this series because my Dad recommended it - he thought it was just great. It doesn't do as much for me as it did for him - I found it relatively generic as epic fantasies go, with the high point of Hrad Spein not compensating enough for the rest of the series. Still, it's competently executed epic fantasy, if not exactly ground-breaking.

I liked this much better than the first in the series. It's still nothing very original in fantasy terms, but it's competently done and the characters are more rounded this time, I think. Harold isn't any more outstanding to me than he was the last time, but the secondary characters - Eel and Kli-Kli especially - are much more interesting (and in the latter case, much less annoying) than they were before, and I'm beginning to feel invested in them.

The book seems to read quicker than the last one, too. Possibly because of the different structure - #2 is very much an ongoing adventure, while #1 was routinely interrupted with what were essentially self-contained short stories.

Overall, an improvement on the first. Hopefully #3 is even better.