octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

It took me a while to get into this, but about half-way through things started to click and I was interested until the end. This is one of those books that one admires more than likes, I think - at least it is for me. I found the prose a bit ponderous, a wee bit turgid if I'm honest. And there's not really much of a plot, just a narrative that doesn't really string together several characters. Where the great strength lies here, though, is in the atmosphere. All credit to Hazzard, the emotion in this book is on point - WW2 is over, and people are trying to pick their lives up and go home - go back to England, to Australia, to get out of Japan and China. They've been part of this hideous extraordinary thing, and now that it's over the shift back into normal life is disorientating and almost incomprehensible.

So, yeah. Stick with it, and read for the atmosphere, and it does become rewarding. Not extraordinary, not even that likeable to be honest, but certainly a very clear account of a feeling that an awful lot of people must have had.

I enjoyed this but it had the same issue for me as Part 1: with the exception of Gloucester, all these people are terrible, and I don't care that much about any of them. Perhaps I'm supposed to feel sympathetic to Margaret, carting around her lover's severed head in front of her husband the king, but all I could do was cackle unfeelingly at her plight. Though, granted, if I were married to such a ninny I might well need a severed head for solace as well.

The stand-out scene for me was the rioting crowd, bouncing back and forth like tennis balls between Clifford and Cade. A more fickle bunch I've never seen; it was hilarious (and unlike the head, it was meant to be so I think). "Follow the king, peasants!" "Okay!" "Wait, you feckless rabble, follow me instead!" "Okay!" "But the king!" "Yay, the king!" "But the king lost France!" "That bastard!" And then the crowd puts nooses around their necks to show the ninny how sorry they are and the ring-leader gets stabbed in a garden. Frankly, I think it was a slow day in London and the masses were all out looking for a little entertainment. "What shall we do today, darling? Throw our sewage into the street, infect ourselves with cholera, eat eel pie? I know! Let's take part in this giant farce, I always was interested in street theatre. We should take time to enjoy the arts before you die in childbirth on your 14th birthday, shall we?"

Yeah.

I really do admire Shakespeare's being able to compress so much into a narrative, but Part 2 suffers a little from middle child syndrome - it doesn't have as well defined a start or finish as some of his other plays. That being said, the crowd scene and the severed head have carried the day for me.

While I liked this, it didn't grab me as much as the first two. I'm not really sure why, as it was well-constructed and I have a lot of respect for the conclusion, which struck me as particularly consistent. It would have been easy - if not altogether believable - to slap a happy ending on this series, but it's not a happy series and the trauma inflicted on the characters is so enormous, and so long-lasting, that a successful revolution could never wipe it all away. Resistance has a price, and every single person involved pays it to the hilt. So I'm not quite sure why I didn't like it as much as the others. I wonder, though, if it's because I felt less threat. Katniss, through all of Mockingjay, is in a different position: embedded in a community that by and large supports her and her efforts. She's not separated from her family, she's not the underdog in a distant arena. And while this was grim and violent, it didn't have the same looming, overpoweringly ominous sense of horror that the arena did. Given how much I love horror, that could have been the point that made the difference.

Still an excellent series, however. Taken as a whole, I thought it was fantastic.

I read and reviewed all of these separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The 4 star rating for the trilogy is an average of the individual ratings: 4 stars each for The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, and 3 stars for Mockingjay. I really enjoyed the tone and theme of the books, and I'm very fond of both Katniss and the strong focus on resistance. That being said I don't care a single straw for the love triangle, and while the concluding volume stood out for its focus on trauma (both the infliction and the aftermath thereof) it didn't quite have the terrifying pull of the first two books.

Slight but pretty map of the parts of The Hobbit that are set in the environs of the Lonely Mountain. What struck me most was the sheer size of Mirkwood - I've seen it on other maps (for example the one that Tolkien drew) but didn't really appreciate the scale until this. Odd that Hobbiton is not included; one would think that a map of the book would include the start and ending place. Attached to the map is a booklet of places and a short introduction to the story. Again it's fairly slight, but it's not really the main attraction here - not when there's a brightly coloured map to look at instead.

It's always tempting, when reading the great novelists especially, to try to sift through the text to discover something of their own, personal opinions and beliefs. It can be tricky - we can misinterpret, or see things we want to see, or even ascribe meaning where there is none, particularly. With a book like this it's easier: Tolstoy made his own "quote of the day" calendar, essentially, except there's more than one (themed) quote per day and he adds a little piece of commentary of his own - sometimes as little as a sentence, sometimes as much as a couple of paragraphs. This was his pet project, according to the introduction, and readers can see what questions of ethics and philosophy and religion mattered to him most. The vast bulk of the subject matter is religious (particularly Christian, though a substantial amount comes from other traditions) and not being religious myself I can admire the writing and the emphasis on kindness, for example, without sympathising with everything that Tolstoy does. He seems to have a consistent hate-on for science, for example, and it's pretty clear he thinks it's a waste of time and brain space when people could be focusing on their spiritual life and so forth. At one point, there's a piece of writing that laments the waste of intellect in figuring our why water freezes or (my favourite!) how diseases spread, because goodness knows its easier to contemplate the divine in perfect happiness if all your children are dead of whooping cough. The book would get three stars from me if it weren't for that particular emphasis.

No higher, however. The introduction kind of poisoned the book for me and the disappointment lasted. Apparently in the original text (one of them at least) Tolstoy wrote what seemed to be very well-regarded short stories, one for each week of the year. But, the translator says, they didn't appear in all editions and they're quite long all together (!) so he didn't bother. Frankly, I'd rather have read the stories, and given that Tolstoy's great novels were massive doorstopper books then surely the page count could have been increased here to compensate.

I remember reading the news articles and so on at the time, chronicling the potential fate of the Timbuktu manuscripts, and was beyond pleased that the vast majority had escaped destruction. It would have been an incalculable loss, and English here delves into the story behind the saving. It's intercut with history, with alternate chapters describing the attempts of various European explorers to reach the place (often dying horribly in the attempt) but I have to say I found the modern parts more compelling. Most interesting here is the look at the mythologizing of a city (and of a movement) - what it says about the people doing the mythologizing, what it says about the people accepting it. Even if one takes the most conservative, most sceptical opinion, however, it's undeniable that some very heroic people stood up in different ways for books, and for that we can all be grateful.

Compared to its sequel (and my all-time favourite Beatrix Potter book) The Tale of Samuel Whiskers this is perhaps a little bit disappointing, being nowhere near as creepily awesome. Taken on its own, however, it's a perfectly charming little book, even if the kittens unsurprisingly behave exactly as kittens do when dressed, by which I mean they are total disasters. (I still remember my younger sister trying to stuff a cat into a doll's dress. It did not turn out well for her; she should have recalled Tom Kitten.)

This is wonderfully ridiculous. I haven't read this since I was a kid, and Sir Isaac Newton the newt passed me by completely. And let's not forget his companion Mr. Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise, who rejoices in the most delightful name in the whole of Potter. A wee bit of a shame we didn't get to see more of those two - Sir Isaac in particular is one of the rare instances in which I've actually enjoyed a pun. And it has to be said, Potter's illustrations in this one are of an even higher standard than normal... they're just fantastic.

I shouldn't find the ongoing trauma of Peter Rabbit so entertaining, but I do. Here he's dragged back into the Garden of Doom by his cousin Benjamin, to hopefully escape wearing the handkerchief of shame after he lost his clothes escaping said garden in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. And the poor thing really is traumatised... Potter has painted him with various looks of terror and misery throughout the garden jaunt, and his cousin is blissfully oblivious. Alas for Peter, he doesn't realise that his author likes a touch of the horrors (he should try being Tom Kitten for a change) and this visit goes as badly as the last.

I can't bring myself to feel sorry for him. Much.