octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is a fantastic collection, in both senses of the word. It's mostly focused, I think, on boundaries - what it's like to live in the spaces between stories, between histories. It's got a distinctly New Zealand flavour, which is always something I enjoy, mixing mythology and modern life in stories that are sharp and frequently surprising.

I think my favourite was "shapeshifter", the Pania of the Reef story. I also really enjoyed the blackly humorous "blink", in which a young woman either spends time with an alien or alienates herself from another person - or both. I prefer to think of it as both. It's funnier (and sadder) that way.

For all my whining about how world-building ruins fantasy by turning perfectly good novels into bricks, I actually quite liked this. Perhaps because it wasn't pretending to be anything other than an encyclopaedia. I knew what I was getting into, and it wasn't plot or character. No, I was there for the pretty pretty illustrations, and also the maps. I do like fantasy maps - I only wish that this book hadn't stopped giving them halfway through. I mean, a large chunk of this untold history is of Essos and the other lands, so why leave them out? I'm afraid I started losing interest in the cultures once the maps stopped and I couldn't place them geographically to their environment.

As for the people, eh. It's same old same old for Westeros - lots of violent thugs looking to murder everyone around them at the earliest opportunity. Not much new there. The artwork, however, was excellent.

An overview of scientific discovery in 550+ pages. This sprawling book, written with Bryson's characteristic good humour (sadly, still not as funny as I'd hoped) is broad and accessible and filled with often fascinating anecdotes about the life and times of the researchers in question. If it doesn't have quite the literary beauty of Loren Eiseley's work - Eiseley remains my favourite science writer - it's still a fantastic effort, and well worth reading.

A fictionalised account of du Maurier's ancestors as they lived through the French Revolution. Told in the first person by a great-however-many-aunt, it's an interesting if frustrating read. I've not read a great deal set during this period, but most of what I have seems to focus on either the aristocracy or the peasants. The family here, however, seems well-to-do middle class, owners of glass factories, and for me it's a new perspective. It does make me lose some sympathy for many of their collective actions, though - it's less overthrowing the government to stave off starvation and exploitation, and more overthrowing the government for shits and giggles and to profit from the suffering of others. To be fair, the protagonist isn't quite as far gone as the worst of her brothers (and husband), and two of her siblings seem to be genuinely in it for altruistic reasons, but the giant, overshadowing figure in the book is brother Robert, who is such a selfish, destructive force in the lives of everyone around him that I simply can't understand why the protagonist continually keeps forgiving him. I suppose she must have loved him, but I did not.

On the bright side, he's dead now and that's probably a win for everyone.

Bit of a mixed bag this one. I like the strong sense of place, the tendency to narrative, and the quiet wry humour of some of the poems, but the rhyming poems didn't work for me so much. Even the famous "Fire and Ice" feels awkward in my mouth. I found the non-rhyming poems much more enjoyable - I think my favourite was "Maple", about a girl with an odd name that shapes her life, even if she doesn't know why.

I read this because it was part of the Canongate Myth series, but there's not really a lot of myth going on here. The main characters discuss the myth of Iphis, and there's some metaphorical reflection in the text, but it's more general fiction as far as I'm concerned.

I found myself enjoying it more as it went along. The prose didn't work so much for me - it's very plain, lots of short sentences. Just not to my taste, though I'm sure there are people out there who love this style and this book would really work for them. Honestly, what brought it up from two stars to three is the ending - this has a wonderful happy ending that made me smile. Worth reading just for that I think.

I liked a lot of the elements here. The moving castle itself is a fantastic idea, and I adored Sophie. I also liked her sisters and the family relationship between them. But when push came to shove, I liked the first half of the book a lot more than the second. The closer it got to the end, the more frenetic it became. I'm not just talking about the typical building-up-to-climax that happens with most books; rather I mean the mish-mashing together of all sorts of elements, shoving new things in and not quite exploring them enough before the next element came along. All this over-complication was resolved a little too quickly for my tastes, and I found the romance utterly unconvincing.

This is such a charming little book - you'd think it would be saccharine, right from the very beginning ("Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits...") but somehow it isn't. Underneath it's kind of gruesome, really. Peter's dad got turned into rabbit pie, and the same is threatened for Peter - even though the farmer knows the bunnies wear clothes! If you have to undo something's brass-buttoned jacket before you eat it, you probably should go eat something else is my opinion, but then I'm vegetarian anyway.

But the main strength here - as in all Potter's books - are the illustrations, which are delightful. Of course Potter was an accomplished naturalist in her own right, and it shows.

Mildly enjoyable series of narrative poems, mostly concerned with rural life - or with the people who live in rural environments, to be more accurate. Although I liked the poems, none of them really stood out to me (with one shameful exception). Of the rest, I probably liked "The Self-seeker" the best, but the one I'll remember most is "Blueberries". I read another Frost collection recently, and noted there that I thought his rhyming poems were his worst efforts. Though there's very few of them here "Blueberries" is one - and I couldn't help it, I swear, but from the moment I read the first lines I starting hearing this poem in the rhythms and pacing of Dr. Seuss. ("And all ripe together, not some of them green / And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!")

I am a terrible reader. I feel bad about that, but again - I couldn't help it!

This is an America-centric collection of writings (various articles, patents, letters, etc.) from the 1990s that, while they are on the subject of this book, weren't written for this book. By which I mean Eisen hasn't rounded up a bunch of authors and asked them to write for Suppressed Inventions, rather it appears he has collated from existing sources. Nothing wrong with that! But I would have liked to see attribution - "first appeared in" and so forth. Because some of the contributions are decades older than the book, but there's no obvious acknowledgement of this. Clearly the chapters dealing with the space age are a little more current, but the bulk of the medical chapters are focused on the first half of the twentieth-century - and that is where they are left. I mean there's some interesting stuff there, but it's hindered by poor presentation. It really needed an editor to give historical context - alright, you've got a whole lot on Harry Hoxsey, even some stuff by him, but he's long dead. And frustrating as he must have found it to be stymied by the AMA in the 1930s, how are his ideas perceived when the book was written some 60 odd years later? Are his ideas achieving contemporary success, or has he been thoroughly debunked? I've no idea, but in this book he exists only in a historical bubble. This is a consistent problem all the way through, and it became more irritating the longer it went on. I'm not asking to be spoonfed, but I do expect an editor to do more than slap chapters together and hope for the best.

As for the content, some of it was more convincing than others. I am absolutely prepared to believe, for instance, that oil industries are doing their best to smother clean and/or renewable energy. I think that's fairly well established by now. I was surprised and impressed to find references to some well-known and reputable journals backing up some of the authors, but others were less convincing - papers submitted to journals (but not accepted or published) have no place in reference sections, and if you want to stop my eyes from rolling, please refrain from randomly capitalised conspiracy speak ("...VESTED INTERESTS, who are trying to prevent it use by means of such tactics as the FALSE ISSUE .... and even VIOLENCE against the inventors" p. 352). Frankly, if you want to get people to take you seriously you've got to encourage them by not, say, describing an advanced flying machine and then adding that the inventor claimed to hide said machine from the government in a secret Antarctic valley (p.338), because now I am sceptical of everything that person ever claimed to achieve, and am side-eyeing those that choose to believe him.