octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is a very visual book, focused as it is on the imagery not just of mosaics, but of the world surrounding them. Particularly effective, I thought, were the parts with the bison, which were lovely and creepy all at once - I could picture it perfectly in my mind, so kudos to Kay for managing that.

As for the story itself, I'm interested in the main characters and in the political struggle that's ongoing within Sarantium, but I do not care in the slightest about the chariot racing, and I wish there were a greater range of female characters than queens or whores (or queens who were whores). I mean, I've read very few epic fantasies with an artist as the main character - it's a welcome change, and it would have been nice to see that originality in the other character choices. Seriously, this book is whore-obsessed.

I'm never sure, reading Discworld, if it's the Witches or the City Watch stories that are my favourites. I think it depends on which Pratchett book I've just read, so right now the City Watch is slightly ahead. I love Vimes, and I love Carrot - and I love the little hints, here and there, that Carrot is a solid gold genius of a manipulative bastard, using innocence and good humour to bend the world around him. I'm sure he doesn't even crack a smile at the thought of Vimes in the ducal garters he's manoeuvred him into...

All the while Vimes is trying to stop a war that lesser people are trying to start - but there's an awful lot of lesser people, and together they look like a mob. This doesn't bode well for his peacekeeping efforts. I enjoy politics in my fiction, especially political viewpoints that I tend to share, and the anti-war message here is right on target. These parts of Jingo are admittedly a little too obvious, but it's an enjoyable read regardless.

This was just excellent. Dystopias can be depressing, but the best of them offer a path through, and in a way that privileges more than the ability to survive. Survival, as Parable points out, is a bare thing - survival skills may keep a person alive, but it needs more than survival to make a life. And the beginnings of the Earthseed religion/philosophy fills that gap nicely. In many ways it strikes me as a sort of eco-religion, which is fitting as it's essentially an environmental dystopia in which these people are living.

I have a horrible feeling that it may also be a particularly prophetic one.

A total fucking idiot who should really know better woefully underprepares all his children for life in a crapsack world, and when his "But all the good guys have plot armour!" reasoning fails (as a paramecium could have told him it would) their lives turn to custard in short order.

It's still an absorbing read, even second time through as this is for me, but my impressions of it haven't changed much since I last read the series. Ned is still as dense as weirwood, Bran is still dull as ditchwater, but I do enjoy all the other characters, and the world-building is excellent if a little overdone for my tastes (fantasy bloat strikes again).

This first book isn't Sansa's greatest outing, but she's still the character here that interests me most. True, she's got a bitchy streak, but that doesn't excuse her parents using her as an 11 year old meat shield ("We can't let the Lannisters know we suspect them, we've got to keep our pre-teen daughter's betrothal going and dump her, totally unprepared, into a pit of murderous vipers where she will be easily manipulated because we haven't bothered to teach her - the current future queen! - how to recognise danger of this kind.") Not that she's a perfect child by any means, but can you see Margaery Tyrell allowed to be so ignorant of the world around her? I just find Sansa fascinating - and it's as much the reaction to her on the part of readers (and show watchers) as the character herself that fascinates me. She's kind of a misogyny-mirror, that girl, in a far more subtle way than her sister.

Talking of, I'm also very fond of Arya, though my utter boredom with the Not Like Other Girls, I'm So Much Cooler Because I Have Typically Masculine Interests! trope does limit my interest in her (I feel I've read that trope approximately 10K times already, and it's just as insulting each time). Still, the relationship between Arya and Sansa is the one I'm most invested in in this entire series, and I really hope they meet back up again one day, learn to appreciate and exploit their different talents, and thereafter together rain hell down on the thugs and idiots of the world - Westeros has plenty of them. I don't care if every other main character dies as long as I can have that.

One of my favourite short story collections ever, The Bloody Chamber is a series of fairy tale retellings that are dark, sensual, and just beautifully written. Carter is one of my favourite writers, and the one I tend to measure my own writing against (The Convergence of Fairy Tales probably wouldn't exist without her influence). Her prose is just so rich and flawless that reading her is always a pleasure.

There is literally nothing about this collection that I don't love. I'm not even sure I can pick which of the stories here I think is the best. "Puss-in-Boots", maybe, or "The Erl-King", or "The Tiger's Bride"... they're all excellent.

I always find Wyndham enjoyable, but to me this doesn't have the sheer genius of The Chrysalids or the warmth and humanity of Chocky. That being said, it's still a thought provoking read, although one hampered I think by structure. The story is very much in two parts, and the first (and larger) is the less interesting. It's the Children themselves that should be the focus of the entire book, not just of the second half of it. Restricting the narrative in this way means the threat takes too long to get started and is over too quickly.

Interesting retelling of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. It's both better and worse than the original. While there's a much more compelling emphasis on the stories of the women who were forcibly impregnated by the aliens, the alien Children are much less interesting here - and much less scary - than they were in Wyndham's version.

Frost's first book, and it shows. You can see the seeds of what he will become here - there's the characteristic focus on rural New England life, albeit in this case interspersed with poems on fairies and Pan and other "poetic" subjects. That being said, in many cases the rhymes are laboured and while there are some lovely images there isn't a single poem here that really caught my interest.

The ideas in here are incredible - it's clearly been given enormous amounts of thought and research, and parts of the book are absolutely fascinating. It feels slightly churlish to say that where it didn't work so much for me was the characters... especially as I think the biggest character in this is Mars itself, which was vivid and immense and really the the best part of the book for me, far overshadowing the humans. There were a lot of people characters that I got sick of very quickly... to be honest, I didn't care in the slightest about a single one of them. I found it hard to see them as anything but walking philosophies: this is the person who thinks it should be preserved as much as possible, this is the person who sees it as a resource for Earth to exploit, and so on. I wasn't sorry when they all began to die; the planet itself was far more interesting.

I don't know if I'm comparing it unfairly to Aldiss' White Mars, which I read years ago and which left an extraordinarily deep impression, but I managed to unearth a copy of the latter (it turned up in my mail box recently) so I'll have to read it again to see how they compare.

My preferred reading genre is fantasy and science fiction, which is a genre that's somewhat over-prone to series - endless sequels and prequels and so on. I have been known to complain about this, because frequently these additions feel like uninspired cash-grabs. That's exactly the feeling I got with Part 2 here. It feels like something cobbled together to link Part 1 and Henry V, both of which were much more compelling. And I have to say, Prince Henry's sudden character change was not terribly convincing, although the old King's massive deathbed guilt trip was marvellously done and possibly the highlight of the whole play.

With this, I have now finished all of the histories. Richard II remains supreme amongst them, I reckon, but this is by far my least favourite. The introduction was actually more interesting...