octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Oh, the vegetable horror! Creepy as they are, the ambulatory triffids are the sort of secondary apocalypse here, with their stinging predation only really able to become a widespread threat when humanity has managed to handicap itself by general blindness and dodgy orbital weapons. Yet for all that rather over the top summary, The Day of the Triffids is essentially a relatively quiet story about a changed world, and how changes in one species open the way for others. It's power relationships and ecology, and a low-key debate over the most civilised way to both adapt to a new world, and to rebuild the best of the old.

Fascinating exploration of the phenomenon of intelligence - mostly human intelligence, although one of the chapters has a convincing argument that primates and animals such as dolphins have sufficient capacity to warrant the same legal protections as humans. It is, of course, an evolutionary argument, and one which Sagan applies to all the hominins (as much as he can, at least, for physical evidence is hardly exhaustive in some cases). The complex interaction of biology and environment has had a profound effect on our ability to think, and in consequence our bodies have developed some very strange characteristics. For instance, the left-hand/right-hand sides of the brain and how they process sensory information is delightfully weird, and the experiments and case studies which Sagan uses to help explain the science behind the history of the brain made the book clear and accessible.

I've been dithering between giving this 2 or 3 stars, and I've plumped - with some regret - for 2. Look, parts of this were excellent. I really enjoyed Kaladin and the bridge crew (although his Tragic Backstory left me cold) and I appreciated that Sanderson has done something interesting with gender and actually given more thought of what to do with women than vacantly assign them to the repression-through-realism box. I was interested in Shallan and Jasnah's storyline, and briefly considered getting the next book in the series from the library to see what happened to them.

But ultimately - and the reason for the 2 star rating - for me, the moments of enjoyment aren't worth the investment of the reading. This is just SO DAMN LONG. 1000+ pages of often mind-numbingly repetitive storyline (I can't help but refer to Dalinar as Dullinar, because worthy as he was how many times do we have to sit through his constant angsting and boring visions oh my God, I was kind of rooting for Sadeas at the end there). I just cannot help but think that this book would have been an excellent series of novellas - one each focusing on Kaladin, Shallan, and Dullinar, who might have approached interest with a more limited word count.

Honestly, part of this is that epic fantasy is a tough sell for me. I have no patience with 50 page prologues (it nearly got chucked at that point, until Sanderson started an actual story for me to follow) and I find endless battle scenes tedious beyond belief. (This book is stuffed with endless battle scenes.) If these things are your bag then you'll probably enjoy this book and more power to you. In the end, however, despite the genuinely likeable parts of it, and despite that fact that some sections of it are extremely well-written, the 2 star rating came down to 2 things.

1) Near the end, each time I turned a page I would say, with increasing levels of irritation, "How much fucking longer?!"

2) When I asked myself if I wanted to get the next volume out of the library, my automatic answer was "Oh fuck no". Sorry Shallan, sorry Jasnah. I liked you and your jam and sorcery adventures but you're surrounded by a lot of fat and it needs cutting for me to want to eat here again.

A beautifully written account of the year after the author's husband died, mere days after their only daughter was hospitalised with a critical illness. It's a dreamy, searching account of how to encompass a new life when the very centre of it has shifted into hollowness. That being said, well-written as it is, this is a very static book. It can hardly help being so - Didion is hit with a series of traumatic events and is wandering round in a sort of fog for the majority, and one can't blame her. She's stuck in grief and while it's an interesting and valid approach for a book, if you're looking for something with more of a sense of emotional movement this probably isn't for you. I enjoyed it, though, which in itself is a kind of depressing thought: that this likeable read is only around for me to read because another woman got her life ripped apart.

Extraordinarily well-written novella with a strangely relatable protagonist. I'm not sure I've read one like him, presented with so little judgement. Meursault seems to have real difficulty with any but the most superficial human connection, yet his attachment to the act of living - his response to heat and endings - is profound. And the prose here is beautiful - I'm reading the story in translation, of course, so I don't know how much is down to Camus and how much to Smith - but it's abnormally smooth and easy to swallow.

You know, I started reading this and I was a little disappointed, because it's clearly Frame drawing material from her family life and having read all three volumes of her excellent autobiography it felt at first a little repetitive. But this is clearly a fictional story - inspired by life events but not limited to them, and events move in different ways and have different outcomes. It also splits into following the surviving children separately, giving them equal space in the story with parents and childhood. So the disappointment was very brief - and even then Frame's prose is just so astonishingly good it's hard to tear away from it. I read the book in a single day, and each word is placed so precisely, so double-formed for beauty and quiet slicing unhappiness that you can see quite clearly, in this her first novel, just what Janet Frame would come to achieve.

Oh dear. I've never read this before and probably won't again, but I feel a bit bad giving it two stars. Basically because of the prose, which is gorgeous and so accomplished - if only that prose had been put at the service of a story I gave a damn about. As it is I don't like any of the characters and don't remotely care what happens to a single one of them. At least the novel is relatively short, so the time spent with these tiresome individuals was limited - but even the prose couldn't keep me from being a little bored while reading, I'm afraid. It goes into the pile of books I admire for their achievements but cannot warm to.

Utterly delightful. If I'm completely honest, I think it rambles on a trifle too long what with the china village interlude and all, but the lion and the tin man and the scarecrow, the poppies and flying monkeys and green spectacles are all so imaginatively done, and the kindness that underlines the story is so always-present, and yet never really shoved down your throat, that it's a pleasure to read. (Even if it's a bit strange to read about silver shoes instead of ruby slippers! All my knowledge of this story came from the Judy Garland film, which differs in a number of small ways.)

If I weren't already inclined to give this story five stars, this particular edition would earn it due to the fantastic and gloriously funny illustrations by Michael Sieben. Dorothy looks stoned throughout, and I cackled my way through each new drawing.

You know, reading this I realised that I'd never read a Stephen King book that I didn't like. I've never read one that I loved, either, but the skill carries me through. I zipped through Bag of Bones really quickly, even though it is enormous, and that too is characteristic of my King reading habits. Reading his books is always so effortless - I get sucked in and carried along and never stumble even when his books are over-long, as I think this is. Could have cut a good 150 pages I reckon.

So, a mixed bag. I love the characters (both creepy and not), but still think it took far too much time to get started. That said, I found the lengthy middle more interesting than the ending. The ratcheting up of "This town is weird and dodgy" was really effective, but once it got to the end and the motivations started being laid bare... let's just say I am beyond sick of seeing rape used as a plot device and leave it at that.

The ending's left me torn, really. I own the book, and I've been reading though my (overstuffed) bookshelves lately, trying to weed out the books I won't read again so they can find more deserving homes. I was all set to keep this for 90% of the book, but that hackneyed, disappointing plot device will probably make sure I never read it again. It's kind of spoilt the wonderful middle for me, to be honest.

My favourite King book and has been since I was a kid, when sleepovers would consist of junk food and watching the mini-series over and over (cue a bunch of adolescent girls hiding behind their pillows and screeching their heads off). It's probably done more to make kids hate clowns than any other piece of story-telling, and it deserves credit for that, but it's a sprawling wonderful mass of neuroses and I love it. Truth be told the book's a bit too sprawling - it could probably lose several hundred pages without losing anything else - but the depiction of the seven kids themselves can hardly be beaten. Those kids always seemed so real to me (much more real than their adult counterparts), and the only sour note of the book is what knocks this down from five stars - that utterly ridiculous pre-teen gang-bang, which I thought was exceptionally stupid as a 14 year old girl and which has consistently evoked the same reaction over multiple decades and rereads. It never felt natural to me - more like the author was trying to be edgy and flummoxed a brain-dead editor into going along with it. Rarely do my eyes roll so hard when reading an otherwise wonderful book.

Even so, it remains a favourite.