octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

It's going to be difficult to describe this book without overusing the word "charming" - but it is charming, and nearly 100% of that charm comes from the wordplay, which is light and frothy and so distinctive. It's just so much fun to read, and one gets the impression that Rushdie had a lot of fun writing it. Not to mention the story itself is full of bizarre, amusing - and yes, charming - images. I'd love to see an illustrated version of it, especially of the rhyming fish (my favourites!).

Another book that I'll have to get my own copy of.

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. I feel a bit doubtful classifying this weird little novelette as a picture book, but it is! It's just a picture book for adults, with old museum photos and illustrations, with odd little drawings and library stamps for verisimilitude. It's dark and creepy with an odd wry humour at times - to be honest, if it weren't for the whole abduction and cannibalism bit, I wouldn't mind being trapped in a library basement with instructions to read books (albeit possibly not books on tax collection in the Ottoman Empire) and fresh doughnuts brought to my cell at regular intervals. That doesn't sound too bad to me... I'd give it an unreserved 4 stars if it weren't for the ending, which is extremely abrupt and didn't work for me at all.

Read it as part of Book Riot's 2018 Read Harder Challenge, Task 15: a one-sitting book.

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. I note that my predictions after reading book 1 as to who the lost prince was, and my idea about what the gift was, were right on the money. The easy guessing continues here, as it was blatantly obvious who the old woman was; I got it some time before Valen did.

In general, another likable read, though my indifference for the main character, and my absolute dislike for his never-ending addiction storyline remains. For all that Valen goes on and on and on about what a threat nivat is to him, he overdoses on it so bloody regularly that it loses all sense of threat (or interest). Of far more interest is dodgy prince Osriel, who at least seems to have a brain and a willingness to use it to make hard choices; he's a fantastic character. What really makes this book - and its predecessor - stand out, however, is the world-building, which continues to be excellent. There's a real sense of place and culture here that's genuinely enjoyable. I don't know if Berg's done more in this world, but I'd be super interested in reading it if she has - I'm a sucker for stories where the king is magically bound to the land and vice versa.

I read this for the Book Riot Read Harder 2018 challenge, Task 3: a classic of genre fiction. And I can clearly understand why it's a classic - it's a likable read whose stand-out quality is its sense of wonder, its immense appreciation of the marine world and all the creatures that live in it. All the natural descriptions are fantastic - vivid and colourful. A lot of them are also inaccurate (in particular the open ocean description of the South Pole) but Verne can in no way be blamed for that, he was writing with the best information he had at the time.

All I knew about this book before reading was that there was a character called Captain Nemo who had a submarine called Nautilus. I rather had the impression that he was the protagonist. He's certainly far and away the most interesting character here, but his actual page time is really quite limited. Which is a bit of a shame, because as wonderful as those natural descriptions are, I'd have liked a bit less of Professor Aronnax going on and on about them and a bit more of the looming and compelling Nemo.

An interesting enough beginning to this mini-series of books, though I wish there weren't so many pages of tedious technobabble (why bother with plot or characterisation when you can fill endless paragraphs with made-up bits of computer guts?). On the bright side, Wright's alien threat, the Petraw, are really fun. To be honest, I enjoyed them more than the Enterprise crew! There's so much conflict and back-biting and scheming going on within the Petraw ship that it livens up the story no end.

Any Discworld novel is a treat. (Alright, maybe not the first two, but you get my drift.) Any Discworld novel starring Granny Weatherwax, however, is certain to be enjoyable. She's my favourite Discworld character, and in this outing she's up against a family of Very Modern Vampires, who are doing their best to drag themselves into the Century of the Fruitbat while still retaining revolting habits and even more revolting retainers. (I've never been much of a fan of the Igors, one can almost feel the spit while reading.) The vamps are Treating People Like Things, which is the greatest sin possible in Granny's world, and though it takes a bit out of her she's determined to send them the way of fairies and fairy godmothers and so forth. That way is further down the food chain, the one that has Granny on top, and honestly I never get tired of reading that.

Goodreads list function is leading me to read all sorts of books that would otherwise pass me by! And that would be a shame, because this is both charming and funny. And strangely relatable - we all know those people who think their pets are smarter than they appear. (Unfortunately I'm not one of them, I'm all too aware my cat could be out-thought by a pineapple.) But Mercy's owners are so certain of their greedy pet's genius that they're all too convinced that the animal they so closely resemble (ha!) has saved their bacon. When really, Mercy's motivations are a lot more... piggish.

Look, the movie is better. I don't say that often but in this case it just is. By an order of magnitude. I mean no disrespect to Foster here, as this is a perfectly serviceable adaptation and I enjoyed reading it, but the visuals of A New Hope are so embedded in my mind that any adaptation of the film was always going to struggle. This is particularly the case in the final assault on the Death Star, which was truly exciting in the movie and honestly a bit dull in the book, but the rest of the text is likeable enough, if not exceptional in its approach. It is what it is: an adequate retelling of a exceptional movie.

I had such difficulty deciding on a rating for this. The difficulty lay in the fact that the writing itself is beautiful and evocative, really exceptionally so... but I cannot make myself like the author. I know, different times, blah de blah blah, but there does seem to be an enormous lack of self-awareness here. For someone who goes on and on about the wonder and loveliness of the African environment, she seems to take great pleasure in shooting half the living things she comes across. (When Dinesen/Blixen comments that when she first came to Africa it was her ambition to kill one of every animal I wanted to reach through the pages and slap her.) Not to mention all the groaning about how terrible it is for her to leave her land, with little recognition that the Africans who also have to leave (despite having been there generations longer) might be feeling just a little worse about it. It's hard not to read this and side-eye a lot of the old colonialist attitudes that come shining through.

In the end I plumped for three stars instead of four. Honestly, the writing itself deserves four stars - for all Blixen's failings as a person she's an incredible writer - but one too many scenes in which she happily kills things also killed my enjoyment, or at least materially limited it. Worth reading for the gorgeous prose, but it is a product of its time and no mistake.

James Kirk is on a milk run, escorting colony ships to their new home, and we know going in that it's all going to go horribly wrong (else where would the story be?). But it's not the battles and various action sequences that stood out for me here, it's the tone. Kirk's getting old, looking back on his life and the sacrifices made by others to get him where he is, and there's a really quite visceral sense of quiet loss and of poignancy running through the story that I didn't expect. Where it doesn't stack up so much for me is the broad strokes - the main villain of the piece, Billy Maidenshore, is a caricature on legs and every time he's on page the whole thing drops and I get ever more irritated. I hope he dies soon in this series, because I'm sick to death of him already. There's enough genuine, thoughtful conflict with the alien wars and the disagreement between colonists (and between colonists and Starfleet) to propel the narrative without going back to the cartoon villain well again and again and again. I was really close to giving this 4 stars, but the quite excellent tonal restraint doesn't extend to the plot on this point.