octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I feel a bit guilty giving this only three stars, because it contains the truly astonishing poem "The Second Coming", which has justly earned the accolades it's received since publication. The rest of the collection, however, did very little for me. I can see that some of the poems are put together well, and the overtly political ones are a bit more interesting than the rest, but other than "The Second Coming" there's not one that I'd be likely to bother reading again, to be honest.

This is the second Yeats collection I've read lately, and I think overall I like it better than Michael Robartes and the Dancer. That had one stunning poem ("The Second Coming"), and while The Tower doesn't have anything that matches that, the standard as a whole is higher, in my opinion - I certainly enjoyed reading it more. The sequence of poems titled "A Man Young and Old" was excellent, but my favourite piece here was "Leda and the Swan".

Really quite readable for such an old book, although it truthfully should be called "The Boys of the New Forest" as Marryat has less than no interest in the two sisters of the title children, preferring to follow the exploits of their brothers.

It's certainly a product of its time, from a political and social perspective, and the bias of the author shines plainly through - I side-eyed the text quite a few times. Still, despite this and the absolutely romanticised version of peasant life that the kids lead, it scoots along fairly quickly and at least has a semblance of a plot, which considering some of my more recent reads was something a relief.

A really very interesting read from Orwell, consisting of three long essays on literary topics. The first, on Henry Miller and his Tropic of Cancer, suffered a little from the fact that I've never read Miller and so lacked a literary context, but Orwell's method of talking around a book instead of on it is enough to follow along, and I enjoyed the sheer breadth of his critical review here. The second piece (and my favourite) was on Charles Dickens, who I am familiar with and greatly enjoy, and Orwell picks out his strengths and limitations here and made me think of Dickens in a different way, which is really all that can be asked of criticism - the expansion of impression. I'll certainly be keeping this essay in mind when next reading Dickens (I'm hoping to get through Great Expectations this month). The last essay, on the various boys-own weeklies, is notable largely for the very strong implication that this particular media is kept so vacuous in order to produce generations of loyal and unquestioning proles, essentially. All I can think reading this was that it's a pity Orwell's not around today to do a follow-up - it would be interesting to see what he thought of Ms Marvel, for instance, and how she compares with Billy Bunter as a mirror for a wanted world.

A collection of largely unrelated bits and pieces, and while the collection as a whole is interesting, it's because it averages out as so. Working my way through Tolkien's materials, I am frankly beyond sick of horrible Turin, whose story keeps getting repeated over and over - certainly far more than is warranted. Much more riveting is the background material such as the section on the Palantiri, for instance, or the five wizards. Perhaps this is because that material is new to me and hasn't yet been beaten into the ground as Turin has, or perhaps - like Saruman - I'm more interested in mechanism than sympathising with shitty people, but there you go. It balances out.

One change that I wish would be made to improve the reading experience, is to wholly commit to footnotes instead of endnotes. It is so much easier to read a text when you don't have to keep flipping pages to get the context, and the fact that Tolkien Jr. is willing to use footnotes on some pages but not on others is really kind of frustrating. Especially as he's gone a little overboard with the notes in places - there was a lot of flipping to do. And I did it, as the notes are mostly worth it, but I did it grudgingly, aware that it could have been made easier than it was.

A thoughtful, interesting novel. Quite slow, but I don't mean that negatively - there's a sort of dreamy pacing that goes well with the temporary nature of migration, the doomed setting of the life that's made on the ship. It's a good life too, but it can't last - though I can't help wondering how the Quaker settlers, so steeped in ecological holism, justify what must be the wholesale slaughter of the lives they've nurtured - the ecosystem aboard the Dusty Miller surely won't survive the new frigidity of life planet-side. They discuss everything else in an attempt to reach consensus, but never this. I kept waiting for it...

I'm having the same issue with this as I had with the first volume in the series, really. I can say it's well-written, on a limited level - the individual sentences are put together very well, and there are moments of imagery that stand out (such as the ape-men in the mines), but that's about it. It's not dreadful, but I'm utterly indifferent to everything in it, and it's an indifference that spreads from the main character. Who is frankly not that bright - how he didn't figure out who Jolenta was I still can't understand, it was blindingly obvious - but stupid characters can be interesting. Severian, to me, is not interesting. He seems like he's made out of plastic. A glossy surface sheen, with absolutely nothing going on under the humourless surface. Reader, he is Dullsville. I'm sorry, but he is, and I can't find one iota of interest for this boring, go-nowhere journey that he seems to be on.

A struggle to finish.

Coarser in every way than the original, but still an enjoyable read even though it falls heavily on the soap side of things. Scarlett O'Hara is one of the great fictional characters, and if Ripley's depiction of her is more blurred than Mitchell's, distinctly softened around the edges and lacking the edge and interest of the original, I'm still happy to have more of her. Part of the floundering in character, though, is because there's no real foil for Scarlett in the sequel in the same way as there was in Gone with the Wind. I'm not talking about Rhett Butler here, but Melanie Wilkes - Melanie was the other great character of GWTW, and there's no-one so finely drawn in the sequel to define Scarlett further by contrast.

Instead the broader sketches of supporting characters are underlined by the removal from the American South to Ireland, and a rather forced plot about colonialism and Fenian resistance. Scarlett is so defined by Tara, by her Southern setting, that she rather loses clarity by transplantation. It's clumsily done, but a shadow of Scarlett O'Hara is still more entertaining than a lot of the characters out there.

Over-long and derivative, with a fair few unconvincing character moments. For example: a visiting dwarf remembers a secret passage he saw once, whereas the crown prince, raised in the palace where that secret passage is, doesn't give it a single thought in wartime when the dodgy vizier is loose and shepherding enemies in. Or the great effort to get to a magic lake for a druid to hear a prophecy, only for that druid, days later, to forget he ever heard it (better to perform mind-magic to see if a lost person is alive, even if it brings down all manner of evil creatures, even if the stupid prophecy you insisted on getting, Allanon, says that said lost person is alive). Or that a number of nobles haven't so much as heard of an (admittedly small) kingdom that's only a week or two walk away. (Have none of them ever looked at a map?)

I mean, it's sloppy but it's not utterly dire. I liked some of the characters, and I genuinely enjoyed the twist of what the sword actually does. There's also a fair few creepy monsters about which is always fun. On the whole, though, Sword does suffer from first-book-syndrome, and it certainly isn't as fun or interesting as its two immediate sequels.

Credit where it's due, this is a hugely atmospheric read. Conrad does really well there, and the sense of environmental menace is palpable. But that's about all I enjoyed here. Every single one of the characters is deeply unpleasant (I spent most of the book hoping they'd all fall into the river and be eaten by crocodiles). It's deadly grim and, until the last third, pretty dull. It's also somewhat over-written, as Conrad belabours the theme over and over and over, until even said crocodiles couldn't fail to grasp it.

There is, however, one stand-out line: "You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence." If I take nothing else from Heart of Darkness, it's the determination to find an appropriate time and place to use that line in the future.