octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Honestly, I'd probably give this four stars if I didn't know the enormous positive effect this book had on animal rights, which earns it the extra star.

It's well-written, but I haven't read it for years and, now that I have reread it again, I remember why. I can't stand mistreatment of animals, and poor Beauty is mistreated over and over again. There's a happy ending, yes, but even as a child I thought it something of a cheat. More likely he'd end up like poor Ginger. It's an excellent book for promoting decent treatment of animals, but it does make me lie awake at night in a cold rage at how horrible humans can be.

I had a short period of wanting to be a farmer as a kid, and it was because of this book. Of course, I realised fairly quickly that it was a highly romanticised view of farm life and that I didn't really want to be up at 5am to milk cows, or to spend my days scraping chook droppings off the floor, but at the time it sounded very briefly wonderful - especially the chapter on working in the dairy. To this day I still have a yen to make my own butter.

Romanticised or not, it's still a great book. Even three decades later I still have my copy and take it off the shelves every so often for another read. It's kind of comforting in its relentless enthusiasm for manual labour...

Oh, nostalgia. I read this as a kid and loved it, along with the Willow Farm sequel. It's definite rose-coloured glasses material, but Tammylan and the animal facts made up for it. I've always known what a squirrel nest is called thanks to these books: drey! - it's been useful more than once in crossword puzzles, so that's something...

4.5 stars, rounding up to 5. This is only a novella, but it packs so much into its relatively tiny word count that it's dense and varied and complex, using the myth of Atlas and Heracles as a scaffold for history, and the weight of living with it. Personal history, mythic history, the history of the universe and of science, of space travel and sympathies, and it even folds in poor lonely, terrified little Laika and gives her the happy ending she deserved but did not get. This story's all about the potential for endings - for different endings, the ones we can make ourselves - and yet for all the density of its choices there's still something very light and lively about the prose (at least once you get past the opening pages). Well worth reading, I'm going to have to find myself a copy to keep.

Funny, informal collection of essays about West's life as a fat feminist in comedy. I'd like to say that her accounts of dealing with trolls and rape threats were shocking and illuminating, but I'm all too sadly aware that this is a nastily common occurrence - the genuinely shocking bit was when one of the trolls, who'd been impersonating her recently dead dad, stumbled on the existence of empathy and reached into decent behaviour long enough to apologise. (Sad that this bare minimum is the shocking part.)

Notable here is the strain of kindness that runs throughout the piece. I'd have difficulty forgiving that awful man myself but West seems to have managed it, and her consistent ability to hold on to compassion is really quite remarkable. I seem to have had a reading streak on books privileging kindness lately, and it's been wonderful. More of that, please!

A solid three stars. I do like the emphasis on science here, and there are some passages where the non-science and the science poems reflect off each other, forming small series within the wider text that are really quite special. I have less interest, however, in some of the more "technical" poems, by which I mean the erasure poems which do tricksy things with form. I mean, I can appreciate that these hold a great deal of interest for some readers but they're not for me, especially at the length that some of them are. I prefer Rau's shorter poems, I think, the ones that are less flashy on the surface of them. High point for me was "Kepler's Laws", which was restrained and unfussy and had a simple sort of shining clarity which sometimes got a bit lost in the rest of the collection.

Have finally finished the concluding volume of this YA fantasy trilogy (had to wait on the library to order it!). It's an enjoyable read, but as with the second volume it doesn't quite reach the level of interest as the first. The ending, in particular, seems very crammed together and the political plot with Bracegirdle falls apart excessively easily, considering how he was set up in The Golden Specific as some sort of malign genius. Poor little Datura stands in for the creepy "villain" side of things here, though as with the Lachrima she's not really villainous (and is nowhere near as creepy as them either).

The world-building continues to be excellent, but as always the plot seems more of an excuse to show off said world-building (usually in a series of constant travelogues) than anything else. It's still moderately entertaining, but I'm forced to conclude that though I'd love to visit this world, I wouldn't bother to visit the characters. They're all very nice, but basically they're a tool for travelling and I could wander without them.

Have finally got around to reading this classic, and I can see why it became popular. It's a fast-moving boy's own adventure; a popcorn read of pirates and stolen booty. "Rollicking" is probably the best word. Long John Silver is I suppose the book's greatest legacy, though I found him singularly unpleasant in all respects and was, frankly, sorry that he didn't die. Far more interesting to me were Dr. Livesey and Captain Smollett. (I quite understand the Captain retiring after this voyage of dangerous loons, having soured of sailing for life. It's the sensible action of a sensible man.)

Glad I've read it, but will probably only read it the once.

Really interesting - if sometimes a little superficial - collection of case studies that the author has come across in his career as a neurologist. This is pop science, so I don't expect (and probably wouldn't understand anyway) the genuine depths of each case, but they're still fascinating to read about even if they do leave you wanting more of an explanation, or more of a context. I don't know... I might have rated this higher if it were more in-depth studies of just three or four cases instead of skipping through two dozen of them, but then again such a book might have lost the wonder factor of all these strange things crammed together.

It could very easily, I think, read as some sort of neurological freak show, as these patients and their extraordinary conditions are displayed for reader entertainment. But Sacks appears so genuinely compassionate as he recalls his interactions with these people, so kind and professional, that there's no hint of exploitation here. It reads very much as an attempt to educate, and to raise awareness of the possible disordered workings of the brain, and as such it really is compelling and leaves me wanting to know more.

This is the second of the short-short books I've read recently, in my ongoing effort to read more flash. It is not nearly as good as the mysteries volume. Perhaps it's just that many of these stories are decades old, but they often read as cliched and fairly unsophisticated. Perhaps they were new and exciting at the time, but they're not now. There is a truly execrable group of stories, for instance, based entirely around puns, all of which need to be taken out back and shot. A ridiculously huge amount of the remainder are based around either a deal with the devil or a wish-granting genie. (In fairness, the blame for all this repetition can be laid squarely at the feet of the editor and not any of the contributing authors.)

There are only really two stories that stood out for me here. The beautifully written, if otherwise slight, Jane Yolen story "The Lady and the Merman", and "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Harlan Ellison, which had an excellently punchy ending. Apart from these, there's really nothing extraordinary here. Which is a real shame...