octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is, I think, one of the finest science fiction books ever written, taking a relatively new technology of Orwell's own time and positing a world where the use of that technology is ubiquitous, deadly, and capable of being a political tool of great and prophetic effect. Everyone has their own private collection of seminal texts, the ones you go back to over and over, that have had a towering influence on the way you think about life, and for me 1984 is one of those books. It's thoughtful and compelling in its ideas about language, it's absolutely uncompromising in that hideous, terrifying ending... and yes, it is entirely responsible for my unshakeable rat phobia. (Oh, if only my adolescent self had had the sense to stop reading!) Horrifying, heartbreaking, and vicious.

A series of poems, linked together almost as a story, about the beginning (and ultimately the ending) of an adulterous relationship. The language is sensual and lovely, almost mesmeric, but the very long poem at the end, as the protagonist counts the days since the end of the affair, did jog me out of it a little - I suppose that's almost the point, the jarring end to romance, the opening up again of a world that is suddenly less narrowly focused than it was, but I didn't particularly enjoy the jarring. There are some beautiful poems in here though, and it's hard to pick favourites. "The Breast", "The Nude Swim", "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife" and "It Is a Spring Afternoon" were all excellent. Top place, though, has to go I think to the fantastically named "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator".

I found this really entertaining. Which is strange in some ways - when watching the original episodes I tend to prefer the serious ones to the comedic, but after a run of angst-filled tie-in novels it was a great change of pace to have a Star Trek story that was more light-hearted. Basically, Kirk is assigned to the Enterprise, meets the gang, and things go continually low level pear-shaped as he gets off on the wrong side of nearly all of them and has to ferry round a vaudeville company to boot. In fact I was so entertained that I nearly gave this four stars, and was frankly only prevented from doing so by Stephen, Spock's weird blond Vulcan cousin who has a decided preference for emotion rather than logic. I didn't care in the slightest about him - I would much rather every single bit of his page time were given to Janice Rand (who interested me for the first time ever, it's a Star Trek miracle!) and Uhura, who did a fine job both with mentoring Rand and utilising her musical talents to communicate with another species.

An entertaining, easy-read coming of age story in which Talia escapes her difficult family to train as a Herald, complete with magical powers and an even more magical horse. The main strength here is the protagonist - Talia is sympathetic and I enjoyed reading about her, but I did feel that the more talents got heaped on her in the second half of the book the less interesting she was, and the more she started to feel like a fantasy heroine rather than an actual person. Another positive is the general atmosphere of kindness that surrounds her in Herald training school - obviously there's conflict in the story and enemies to be defeated, but they're often almost outside the text, and it's nice to read a book where pretty much everyone who spends any time on page is a decent person. I have to say, though, that in many ways the book struck me as a very long introduction. A pleasant one, don't get me wrong, but when I came to Goodreads to rate and review and saw that it was the first in a series, I felt absolutely no surprise. The rest of the series will be going on my reading list, though, and I hope they're as likable as this one!

An enjoyable read, and what for me is the best of the series thus far. Granted this is only the fifth of them, but my ratings seem to have fallen into pattern, continually seesawing between two and three stars. Invariably, the higher ratings reflect a book that focuses on Dr. Maturin more than his counterpart, and this volume certainly does that. I'm not nearly so fond of Aubrey as a character, but also the books that focus on Aubrey tend to have lengthy sea battle after lengthy sea battle, and with the best will in the world I find those dull. Here there's only one fight and thankfully it's over quickly. Far more of the conflict is against the elements, or against disease, or the cat-and-mouse game of intelligence taking place aboard the Leopard, which to me is far more entertaining than those interminable cannons.

Much more entertaining than the first volume in the series, primarily because it was clearly focused on Faith and Giles and had some resonance with their past stories. That is, the willingness to kill humans instead of demons, if necessary, and the shared going-off-the-rails-when-young bit. These two have a lot in common and this was never explored the way it might have been in the series, with the show writers preferring to mirror Faith with Buffy instead of her mentor. I'd honestly have given this four stars if it weren't ended with the boring final comic, which gets away from this new interesting duo and has Buffy and Willow in some weird fantasy dimension. I didn't care in the slightest, and I think this book would have been stronger if it had collected the first four comics only, and left the final for another volume. All its addition does is dilute the previous character study.

I liked this much better than the last one, even if there's no Death in it. The story seems less mean-spirited, less enamoured with its own violent edginess and less reliant on non-stop horribleness to run the plot. Not that there isn't plenty of blood and guts in this volume, but it felt less hysterical about it. I'm still pretty much entirely indifferent to the Sandman, but I did care about Rose and was decently invested in what happened to both her and Unity. Also, the collage aesthetics of the title pages and so on are fantastic, the best part of the novel I think! All credit to the illustrators.

I've read this series before, but I thought I'd do a reread. And reading this first volume again I was reminded of how I felt when I first read it: slightly baffled. I mean, I liked it then (as I do now) but at the time I never understood why the Sandman series was so popular. Had I never heard of it I'd probably not have read further, past that first volume. Thankfully I did read further, encouraged by reputation, but I'm still not delighted by Preludes and Nocturnes. I'm sure others would call it "gritty" but more often I find the unrelenting violence just a bit off-putting, really.

To me, the real spark of interest - then and now - came in the final story, with the introduction of Death. She's fantastic - warm and compassionate, a bright spark of such in this volume - and far and away my favourite Sandman character. And reading the afterword by Neil Gaiman, I found that this was the story when he finally felt the series began to really reflect what he wanted for it - needless to say, I felt a little justified in my reactions, because this is where it started to really come together for me as well.

This jumps into the middle of several stories, and that nearly all of them are interesting doesn't make it any less choppy. On the upside, I'm deeply interested in how the multiple Slayers are seen as a threat to the traditional male power structure. I can understand why the latter is being funnelled through the military-industrial complex, but I really really hated the Initiative storyline in the tv series and this is bringing the same (potentially) tedious vibe.

I'll still read the next one though.

"Why is my verse so barren of new pride, / So far from variation or quick change?" (Sonnet 76)

Because you're obsessed on a bunny-boiler level, Mr. Shakespeare, and if you weren't dead I'd be worried about you (or more likely worried about the person you're at least thinking about stalking).

I've not read the Sonnets before, so I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this. Talk about monomania! There's some beautiful stuff here - and it's unoriginal to pick the "summer's day" sonnet (18) as the example but it is the loveliest and the best - but much of it's genuinely repetitive. How many sonnets can one person write in which they're trying to persuade their pretend-boyfriend to breed, anyway? The answer, apparently, is lots, and I prefer the plays.