octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

With the best will in the world I couldn't get into this. It took me literally months to read. I kept at it because I hate not finishing books, but it felt like a chore.

Part of it was the length - this book is enormous, and my patience for enormous SFF gets measurably lower by the day. Part of it was the pacing, which I found unutterably turgid until the last hundred pages or so. But the big thing that put me off was the two competing stories. Although they come together in the end, the bulk of this enormous tome follows two different species and two different plotlines. This can be a great way to write a book, but when readers like one storyline much more than the other, the other risks being thought an absolute drag, and that's what happened here. If this book had been all about the spiders I'd have given it 3 stars. They were interesting characters, an interesting society - and on a fascinating cusp in their development. But the sympathetic spiders were constantly interrupted by the interminably tedious Queng Ho/Emergents plotline. I enjoyed nothing about that half of the book. Didn't care about the characters or culture, was seriously put off by the constant underlying sexual assault and general nastiness. As a result, the bad outweighed the good here, and the book as a whole just couldn't hold my attention.

One of Shakespeare's most quotable plays, and brilliantly written. Perhaps the best written of them all. Yet even so not my favourite. I find it hard to separate my admiration for Hamlet the play with my absolute dislike of Hamlet the character - whiny, destructive, absolutely uncaring of his friends. Claudius may have been a fratricidal villain, but he's spot on when he argues that Hamlet's behaviour is a threat to all around him. Can you imagine that little horror as King himself one day? I can, and shudder to do so. Denmark got lucky the day Hamlet managed, through bad sense and bad management, to get himself slaughtered alongside everyone else.

This is... kind of entertaining in parts, but there are plot holes you could drive a truck through. Not only the timelines, but how come Bertram doesn't recognise his own wife? Helen does this creepy bed-swap thing with the woman Bertram actually wants to fuck, and he can't tell the difference. To be fair, Bertram is a genuinely awful person and there's no reason for him not to be as stupid as he is sleazy and unkind, but I'm stuck on why anyone would go to such lengths to ensnare him in the first place. I want to like the idea of the poor young woman winning the hand of the nobleman husband through cunning and virtue (instead of the all too common reverse), and I can understand, as the introduction states, why this made the play so historically uncomfortable for audiences. But Helen is a rapey obsessive - and let's be honest, if it was a man tricking a woman into bed with him when she thought she was sleeping with someone else we'd call it what it is - and while I have sympathy for Bertram's desire to escape a forced marriage, as I said... he's awful. So this is basically the story of two awful people being awful, and I suppose the only bright side is that neither of them is inflicted on anyone else and Diana gets a dowry (and, presumably, escape from the whole stupid situation).

I mean, it's Shakespeare so the words are lovely. But the story's really not.

I (re)read this as part of Book Riot's Read Harder 2018 challenge, of which one of the tasks was an assigned book that you hated or didn't finish. I was forced to read King Lear in high school and have held a grudge ever since. (Mostly because it committed the grave sin of not being Macbeth, which I was desperately hoping for instead.)

I have held the grudge for some 20+ years and was not looking forward to a repeat but, you know, it's actually pretty good. The language and especially the construction of the story is excellent, and in the first half I particularly enjoyed the fact that pretty much every character, good or evil, was dragging Lear for the stupid fool that he is. The thing is, while I appreciate the play now more as an adult, I still can't fucking stand Lear. He deserves everything he gets, and I can't understand the sympathy he pulls from various people in the second half. He's a bad houseguest, a worse father, and an execrable king. The common folk are better off with him dead, because Lear is a selfish, egotistical and unreasonable tyrant, and I can't help ending the play thinking of all the peasants who were killed in the war that his monstrous, self-obsessed desire for worship ultimately incited.

It's a pretty good play. I do concede that. The reread has been helpful, but as a play about a terrible king it is no Richard II.

It's always a slightly dislocating experience, reading plays, because the reading isn't the play. Even when the writing itself is excellent, a good performance can always improve on it - and some plays improve a lot more in the performance than others. I think Othello might be one of those. Even though I enjoyed reading it, there's something a little flat about parts of it, and although I've never seen it performed, I have a strong feeling that, with the right actors, it could be riveting. Alright, Desdemona's a wee bit of a bore and Othello himself is never quite convincing (his fall into murderous jealousy happens far too easily), but Iago would be fascinating to watch. I can feel some of that fascination in the text, and the horrible traitorous web he weaves is both chilling and compelling, so I can only imagine the effect on the stage. But even as text, he comes across so strongly that I'd probably give this 4 stars if it weren't for that ridiculous bit in the middle where Othello is convinced that his wife's handkerchief - a favoured present that means much to both of them - is currently across town in her lover's lodgings, when literally five minutes before she was trying to tie up his head with it. What, has Star Trek's Mr. Scott caught the hanky in his transporter beam? Let's be honest, the title character is not that bright, and while it's not his fault, exactly, that he gets caught in such a plot hole, it's still a bit hard to overlook.

Enormously thorough listing and explanation of subjects and symbols in art, and full of fascinating detail. The title is somewhat misleading, however. It rather gives the appearance of art in general, but Hall's focus is entirely European - if you're looking to understand symbolism in Asian or African art, for instance, look elsewhere. Of the art covered, the subjects and symbols come primarily from two sources: myth and religion. Even those are somewhat limited - the religious influence is entirely Christian, as would largely be expected in Europe, and the mythology is classical. Greek and Roman sources predominate; there's no mention of Celtic or Scandinavian myth here, for instance. That being said, within these limits this appears, to my limited knowledge, a rather exhaustive reference. And though I read the whole thing through, it's one of those reference books that you could open up and dip into and find something informative and interesting on any random page. It's usefully cross-referenced, too, which makes things easier for the reader who's looking to interpret the symbols of a specific painting - a very friendly reference book that works well for the beginner, I reckon. Being a beginner myself I tried this out with a random painting, Raphael's "Madonna of the Goldfinch", and now I actually understand what all the details mean, so yay!

Sprawling intergenerational novel that comes very much in two parts. The first is an incestuous marriage and emigration to America by the grandparents of the piece, told mostly in the third person, and the second is the coming-of-age of their intersex grandchild, told almost entirely in the first. That's a very poor description that makes the novel sound bitty and disconnected, yet somehow it all works. The voice is remarkably consistent throughout, and yet I don't mind the consistency, for all I prefer Cal's journey to that of his grandparents. It would I think have been easy - certainly tempting - to really try to differentiate the generations in tone as well as time, but Eugenides resists, opting instead for smoothness, and what results is undeniably accomplished. I'm generally hard on lengthy novels, as more often than not they seem flabbily indulgent, but this is one of the minority that reads shorter than it is. Granted, it took a couple of hundred pages to really hook me, but it did get there in the end, and even that long read before hooking was a pleasure, thanks entirely to the prose and voice, which was warm and mildly whimsical.

Exhaustively researched - the notes and statistical appendices take up nearly a quarter of the book - look at the emotional effects of racism on black women in America. Sometimes academic texts can be difficult to wade through - academic prose not being high on the readability scale - but this was well and clearly written and Harris-Perry's use of statistics was judged extremely well. (Usually even the word "statistics" is enough to induce in me a soporific effect, but here they were illuminating rather than incomprehensible.) The author covers a wide range of topics, from the idea and experience of shame to the effects of Hurricane Katrina and the influence of religion on the lives of black women, yet despite the range it still felt a cohesive study, with enough referencing between the parts to make me feel as if I were reading a sustained, convincing argument, full of often horrifying examples. Really worth reading.

I'm not overly fond of the super-genius story, and there are two of them here, macking on each other and trying to overthrow the fascist government that (of course!) one of them has been innocently working for. But, you know, it's a fun read, full of action, and if I don't find any of it particularly convincing I was still entertained. It lacks the seeping dystopian misery of books like The Hunger Games, but life is still nasty, brutish and short for the majority. I think I would have liked to see a little more of that majority - there are hints of it with the riots and rebels and so on - but this is so tightly focused on the primary relationship (the story alternates between June and Day) that there doesn't seem that much room for anything else substantial to come into focus. A popcorn read, but I happen to like popcorn so there you go.

Very clear and simple, if sometimes a little repetitive, explanation of how scientists have learned about suns. The title is really a misnomer - the second poorly titled non-fiction book I've read this week, grrr - as it's not really about Alpha Centauri, as I'd hoped when I picked up the book. Which was initially rather disappointing, but if I'd thought about it I would have realised that there's not really enough known about Alpha Centauri at time of writing, perhaps, to fill a couple of hundred pages. Instead, Asimov has done as he often does in his science writing, and gone into the background of what a star is, and how we know what direction it's going, what mass it has, how luminescent it is, and so forth. Alpha Centauri is frequently used as an example, but then so are a handful of other stars so it really doesn't merit title billing. The real strength of this book is in the science writing itself, which is absolutely accessible to beginners on up, though I do wonder if the dozens of tables weren't perhaps a bit of overkill. I understand that the author probably wanted to use them to illustrate trends, but there are only so many columns of numbers you can read before your eyes start to glaze over.