octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I read and reviewed Songs of Innocence a few days ago, so my focus here is on the second half of the piece. Experience is the better of the two collections, I think - it's certainly less sugary and more ambiguous - but Blake's poetry isn't often something that grabs me. I tend to prefer more modern verse, and that tells. Some of the rhymes, for example, seem a little laboured and unsophisticated to my ears. That said, there's a single poem in Experience that is justly famous; a poem that I love unreservedly. "The Tyger" drags this book up to four stars by main strength, and I wish this edition was illustrated so that I could see how Blake envisioned it.

A short collection of mostly very readable essays themed around the silencing of women as happening at time of writing. Although the title essay came out of a very specific instance of someone blindly assuming that Solnit didn't know the content of her own book and determinedly shutting her out of the conversation, refusing to hear that she wrote the book he was pontificating on, much of this is focused on more violent exclusions. Solnit's right that there's an argument to be had - which for the most part isn't being had - on the divisions of gender and violence, and this book's a good starting point for grappling with that. The risk of essay collections, however, is that they can sometimes be unfocused, and to some extent that's what happens here. There's a lengthy diversion on Virginia Woolf which seems at best mildly relevant, only included because the author has a deep love for her and apparently writes about her a lot. Unfortunately, if you're like me and cannot muster up one iota of excitement for the woman who inflicted Mrs Dalloway upon us all, then you might end up wishing Solnit would put her shoehorned fave aside and get back to the contemporary point already.

This was quite a nice surprise actually, given my apparently immovable dislike for anything that smacks of Gulliver's Travels. I've never been able to get on with the idea of Lilliputian-sized people in a story - bloody GT has done for that - but I gritted my teeth and picked this up anyway. (I'm reading my way through the New York Public Library's list of 100 Great Children's Books and this was on it, so.) I was surprised how dark it is, what with Mrs. Driver trying to slaughter her way to mass murder, and the child eaten by the cat, but there were some amusing bits as well to balance it out. Homily's sudden about-face at being seen, her greed for new furniture overcoming fright, was the best example of that I think. Apparently there are more in the series, and I don't actually hate the thought of reading them, so sucks to you, Gulliver.

A collection of 12 short stories, selected by the editors to primarily appeal to young adults. There's one or two fantasy stories in here, but for the most part this is a science fiction anthology of stories set on Earth, and for the most part it's enjoyable. There were a small handful of stories that I really did not care for, but in such cases I prefer to focus instead on the ones that I enjoyed the most. Best picks in here, for me, are Jane Yolen's "The White Babe", which has a really appealing structure that alternates myth with in-universe academic analysis, and "The Web Dancer" by Somtow Sucharitkul, which has a fantastic main character and a real sense of alien wonder. Just beating these out for top place, however, is "Glacier" by Kim Stanley Robinson, a near-future story of a boy trying to bond with an untrusting pet cat as glaciers slowly encroach on the town that they live in. It's so beautifully restrained in its approach, I can't help but admire it.

I read a lot of books. For the vast majority of them, I don't know anything about the author and don't go looking. Honestly, it's because I'm not that interested - I'm here for the story or the argument, depending on whether it's fiction or non-fiction, and not the author. But occasionally I get curious, and at the end of this book, the acknowledgements section list a geisha called Mineko Iwasaki as the source and inspiration of a lot of the info here. I'd never heard of her and if her life was anything like the book she must be a very interesting woman so I went looking. And what I found I did not like.

Sometimes, in retrospect, you find out something about a creator that is dodgy (see: Bradley, Marion Zimmer). And there's always that question - can you separate the art from the artist? You can make an argument that this is a viable strategy when one absolutely does not reflect the other. There's no hint of child-rape in Rosemary's Baby, for instance, despite the actions of its disgusting director. It's much harder to make that same argument when the behaviour you cannot approve is an integral part of the text.

Iwasaki says that this book is full of inaccuracy. A lot of that inaccuracy is related back to her - the story about the auction of her virginity, for instance, which she says is entirely false. Historical fiction is not historical scholarship, and granted "fiction" is part of the genre title, but I very strongly feel that historical fiction writers have a responsibility to be as accurate as they can. (It's hard not to wonder if the increased salaciousness and general inaccuracy is put there for reasons of exoticism, which is fairly dodgy in itself.) Futhermore, she says that she only spoke to Golden on the condition of anonymity - which as I found myself while reading that final section was a condition that was blithely broken. Apparently she's gotten death threats. That must be lovely. There is zero reason to expose a source this way. Zero. It is not acceptable, and it is part of the book, and that's why for all the pretty language and technically accomplished writing this is getting one star from me. Historical fiction may be fiction, but it should not smack of the gutter tabloids.

Fun little picture book about a cap seller who loses his caps to monkeys and how he gets them back. The story itself is quite simple, and it's easy to see where it's going, but what I liked most about this was the illustrations. Because the peddler is none too bright, and wears all the caps stacked on top of his head, the environment around him is designed to mimic this. The illustrations - especially those of the village - have this matching vertical stretch about them that makes them really interesting to look at.

One of the things I continually appreciate about reading is the surprises it can give you. Not so much the twists and turns of story, but of how you react to that story. There are books that I know are flawed and silly and not that great objectively, but I still enjoy them anyway - the popcorn reads. Then there are ones, like this, that go the other way. The ones where I say "There's nothing wrong with it, but..." Because there isn't anything wrong with this one. It's well-written, and rises to genuinely observant at a few points. It's fairly thoughtful, if not perhaps as thoughtful as it thinks it is. I should like it better than I do. But the plain truth is I found Where My Heart Used to Beat a little bit boring. It improved slightly as it went on - the first third felt deathly slow - but though I finished it I simply could not connect with it. Worthy but dull is an accurate description, I think.

A really interesting essay (originally a speech) about Le Guin's experience writing her Earthsea books. More specifically, it's about how her understanding of fantasy changed in the long period between the third and fourth books - what she thought about gender and how it related to the hero's journey. This brings up questions of what a hero is (and isn't), and the importance of quest narratives in propping up the traditional notion of the hero, and the corresponding role of women in fantasy. Given that my favourite Earthsea books were the two that focused on Tenar - to be honest, Ged has always bored me a little bit - Le Guin's analysis and honesty about her own biases was a fantastic read. I haven't come across a lot of her non-fiction before this, and I'm excited to read more of it.

So, there are really two versions of this book. This is essentially the version for younger readers - I read the version meant for adults back in May, and gave it four stars when I reviewed it. So why did I rate this one higher?

The plain fact is I liked it better. Though in one way I wonder if that's a failure of intelligence on my part, as this book's shorter and less detailed than the other version I read. It lacks the same level of political context, of history, of background and context and analysis of what, exactly, is going on in the region of Pakistan where Malala comes from. This edition skims over a lot of that. As someone who enjoys non-fiction and information in general I would have expected my preference to go the other way, but as interesting as that adult edition was, there were times when context got in the way of personality. It diluted it, in places drowned it out. This book, geared to younger readers, is stripped back almost entirely to the personal. It's the voice of a child reaching out to other children, and it reminded me inescapably of The Diary of Anne Frank. Not so much in subject, but in the sense of a real and vibrant personality on the page. The story here is less informative, perhaps, but it's also more immediate and more affecting, and ultimately that's what tipped the scale for me.

If you get the chance, grab the version in front of you and read it. If you get the choice, go for this one.

Beautifully illustrated edition, with woodcuts by Byron Glaser. The story itself is one of Poe's classics, but it's never gripped me as some of his other short works have. It's a creepy, atmospheric read, but The Tell-Tale Heart always strikes me as being a little too compressed. The disintegration at the end of the (admittedly insane) protagonist happens so quickly that it never seems quite credible to me - compare, for instance, to Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, which is admittedly entirely different in subject and tone, but which is also a short horror story about the mental decline of a first-person narrator. Gilman is far more convincing, and I think that's because she gives more space for madness to grow, and is more focused on decline than immediate effect. Poe's gone for style over substance here, and it shows.