octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I seem to be having a run on picture books with horrible protagonists lately. That being said, this is a retelling of a folk tale that I've never heard of before, so it was interesting to read a new one, and the illustrations are undeniably lovely - full of colour and birdlife. I like that it's bilingual as well - not that I can read the Spanish, but this is the sort of thing more picture books should be doing, to get kids interested in other languages early.

Continuing to read my way through the New York Public Library's 100 Great Children's Books list, and finally we have a picture book that I like unreservedly. This may be in part because I'm delighted it's written by the author of Riddley Walker, which could not possibly be any more different, but it's also because I like Frances and I like food and her little songs of what she will and will not eat are genuinely amusing. And after reading what those kids are having for lunch, I'm hungry and off soon for mine...

Likeable little picture book about a kid who loves music. The story's fairly simple, but what really sets this book apart and makes it a little different from the average is the art. The illustrations are really sophisticated, a black and white art deco set of drawings, appropriate to the jazz age in which the story is set. Really, it's no surprise that the story's so simple and there are very few words, because I imagine everyone who picks this up is looking more at the pictures than the text.

A simple story that links animal to animal, a bit like a daisy chain that isn't made into a circle yet. It's so simple that I'm not sure I'd even call it a story, actually; it's more of a line. But what makes it is Carle's animal illustrations. He's got such a vivid style, and one that I've loved ever since I was a kid myself, reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar. You can't mistake Carle's illustrations for anyone else's, and they're a pleasure to look at.

Rubina's baby sister is a brat, and her mother is no help. In fact, her mother encourages the brattiness by giving in to bratty tantrums so it's no wonder really. I think I'm supposed to find the ending uplifting, as Rubina rises above and becomes the better person, but all I can think is that this poor child has no birthday invitations and no friends left because the brat and the mother who spoilt her have chased them all away. A lollipop is hardly compensation.

A young woman attempts suicide. She survives, but the damage she's done to her heart in the attempt has left her a week to live. She spends that week in an insane asylum, surrounded by the stories of others who, like herself, differ from the expected behaviour of normal people. The ending - which I won't spoil - is I think honestly something that most readers will see coming. (Coelho has seeded enough hints through the story that it shouldn't be a surprise.) But then, the point of this story isn't the twist ending. It's that life is something to be savoured, and that by treating each day as if it were your last you can better appreciate the magnitude of the gift. It's a little bit obvious in some places for my tastes, and could do with a little more subtlety, but there's something fundamentally gentle and kind in this that I really do appreciate, and it's awake to possibility and marvel as well, which is always worth reading.

In the last few pages of this book, Lange talks about how he travelled down to Dunedin to speak there in 2004, and of his great surprise that he, very ill at the time (he would die the following year) was able to get through his speech without help. I was there for that speech - Lange was one of NZ's great political orators, and I wasn't going to miss it - and it was shocking how poorly he looked. I remember feeling such sympathy for him, and I felt the same reading this book. Although there's flashes of that characteristic sense of humour and verbal flair it's clearly an effort. There's an air of exhaustion, a slow, tired winding down, and a growing awareness that the time for honest appraisal of his achievements is short. It's still an interesting read, however, and an accessible one... and never has the job of Prime Minister looked so unglamorous.

A short study of how literature perceives illness, written by Sontag when she was a cancer patient herself. Because it's relatively short, her focus is less illness than disease, and less disease than specific diseases - consumption and cancer. (There's also some reference to syphilis, but this is comparatively minor, surprisingly - I would have thought there'd be a lot of references to syphilis in literature worthy of exploration.)

Sontag argues that both consumption and cancer have become somewhat mythologised; that built up around each is a network of metaphor and expectation. What's strange, reading this some 40 years after it was written, is how familiar the consumption narrative seems, and how alien (some of) the cancer narrative appears in comparison. Yet popular understanding of cancer has changed dramatically over the decades, so this shouldn't be surprising. Some of Sontag's conclusions aren't particularly convincing - while I appreciate that clarity is needed in talking about disease, metaphors actually increase clarity for some people, I think, and naturally as a writer myself I see them as a useful communicative tool. But for all that it's a fascinating little book, very easy to digest, and excruciatingly well-read.

Julie Powell's effort to cook her way through the massively intimidating Mastering the Art of French Cooking is hugely entertaining, even if (due to vegetarianism) I wouldn't want to touch a lot of what she cooks with a barge-pole. A lot of what makes this very informal memoir funny is that Powell is by no stretch of the imagination the greatest cook in the world. She's not even close. Not incompetent, but picky eating habits as a kid have left great gaps in her culinary capability - she's never cooked an egg, for instance. Perhaps that says something terrible about me as a reader, finding humour in someone else's ineptitude, but really. I can't ever picture myself trying to extract marrow from an uncut bone, but I'm pretty sure I'd be floundering too and that's reassuring in its mild spitefulness, so I'm laughing with a clear conscience. And credit where it's due, Powell set herself a ridiculous task, albeit as an escape from a very ordinary life, and she managed it - and as much as I enjoyed giggling at the frustrations caused her by one of the world's most famous cookbooks, I was equally happy to see her succeed.

Who'd have thought - an economics book that isn't dull as paste? Next thing someone will manage to make philosophy interesting. (Though that, perhaps, is a step too far. One must keep within the borders of possibility.) Anyway, this is less a cohesive argument than a series of largely unrelated case studies, and I enjoy that. It's like a short story collection but non-fiction, and I do like short stories. And even within the individual studies there are some pretty odd pairings - I would never have thought to compare sumo wrestlers with school teachers, for instance - but then, as the authors argue, economics is the study of incentives, and when laid out neatly it's clear that incentives can encourage some interesting, and ultimately understandable, behaviour. Enlightened self-interest, I suppose you'd call it - an accessible idea, everyone gets it. And by capitalising on this shared knowledge, and by not muddying it up with the type of economic-speak designed to drain interest from stones, the authors have produced a really compelling - and genuinely accessible - book. I can't say it's left me with a terrible yearning to go and study economics, but it has left me looking at the world around me with a marginally more critical eye, and you can't really ask for more than that.