octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. There's some really interesting stuff here, although in a few of the essays the interesting stuff is smothered by some rather turgid writing - I know that academic style isn't riveting at the best of times, but still. In fairness, most of the chapters here (and most of the authors) are readable enough, and their topic - the development and themes of travel writing - genuinely held my attention. Most interesting to me was Part One (of three), which dealt broadly with surveys of the state of travel writing in different time periods. This historical approach focused on the development and social context of the genre, and while I enjoy travel writing I never appreciated how broad a history it has before. Also well worth reading were the case studies of Part Two, which looked at how travel writing constructed narratives - not always truthful ones - about Arabia, the Amazon, Tahiti, Calcutta, Ireland, the Congo, and California. For all the different destinations, the one shared characteristic of analysis here seems to be how much travel writing prioritises the expectations and culture of the writer, as opposed to the destination the writer is ostensibly (and completely unobjectively) observing. Which makes total sense once you think about it...

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. This is a really quite interesting play about two blind beggars who are cured by the intervention of a saint, and discover that living as sighted people isn't so very wonderful after all. I don't want to spoil the plot for anyone who hasn't read it yet, but it is blindingly obvious from the very first. Blindingly... (pun unintended). Yet the plot isn't really the interesting thing here. Synge does a lot with the ideas of sightedness and choosing what to see and not-see, and it works on multiple levels. On some, even, that he probably didn't intend.

There's a lengthy introduction by Nicholas Grene in this edition, for instance, which has quite a harsh view of Molly, a young woman who is genuinely rather contemptuous of Martin and Mary, the old blind couple. (She's not the only one - most of the characters here are rather unpleasant, and I'm not excepting Martin and Mary.) But Grene clearly misses any potential feminist reading of this, in which Molly has agency enough to look for herself instead of just being an object to look at. Just because Martin has regained his sight and finds her pretty doesn't mean she should run off with him - but Martin doesn't see it that way, because only his vision matters, and the idea that a pretty young girl doesn't see an old and ugly man as equally attractive absolutely refuses to occur to him - unlike Grene, I've no sympathy for him post-rejection.

But although it can be read that way, this isn't really a feminist text - it could far more easily be read as an attack on religion or capitalism, for instance. As I said, it works on multiple levels, and underlying all is a really bitter, black humour. You find yourself laughing when you know you really shouldn't, because some of the things that happen are awful, really genuinely unkind, but still. Horrified laughter. It's much more entertaining than Synge's Playboy of the Western World, which I also read recently and which is supposed to be his masterpiece.

This is just excellent. A close look at the finches of the Galapagos Islands, following a monitoring programme which has been going on for decades - scientists returning year after year to record the populations of various finch species - and using the results of that programme to tease out evolution in real time. And that is the exciting focus of all that work: the discovery that evolution is happening there in visible, short term form, in the finch populations. (And this visibility is not just confined to the finches! Weiner has constructed this book amazingly well, and has compared the finch work with similar projects on fish from Venezuela, for instance, and a number of other relatively short-lived species in which natural selection is clearly illustrating evolutionary principle.)

This is deeply exciting and relevant work, and it's presented here in a way that anyone can understand it... should they choose to. These experiments should be talked about in every biology class from high school on. Hell, from primary school if possible. It is clear, rational, illuminating work.

Readable if unspectacular story of a young Dana Scully, who after running foul of a serial killer plumps for science over woo. There's some good character stuff here, and the highlight for me was the focus on her relationship with her sister Melissa, who essentially got fridged in the show, alas. Scully's always had flashes of psychic ability, so it's clever of this prequel to play into that, but it was blatantly clear who the real villain was. I know she's only 15 here, but her ability to detect bullshit clearly isn't honed yet, else the paper thin plot would have been obvious to her too. And talking of bullshit detection: I wasn't particularly enamoured of the implication that Captain Scully was somehow involved in The Project - not everything has to tie in together! But though I wish that plotline had been dumped like the stinker it is, the rest of the book's a little better... but then again it'd take a lot for me to want not to read about Dana Scully.

Oh dear. This is just... not good. The other book in this series, Devil's Advocate, on the young Dana Scully, wasn't great either but this is worse.

First, credit where it's due. The one thing that works here for me is the absolute fracturing of Mulder's family. After Samantha's abduction, that family falls apart, each member in his or her own way, and it's not pretty but it is realistic and affecting. It doesn't, however, make up for the two glaring problems here. One is Mulder's love interest and best friend Phoebe (not the Phoebe from "Fire", either, I don't know if that makes it better or worse). Phoebe is a Scully-clone, essentially, and given the Scully-Mulder relationship is at the heart of The X-Files trying to recreate it seems a poor decision at best. The most successful part of Devil's Advocate was Scully's relationship with her sister Melissa, a pre-existing character who filled a niche perspective different from either of the two main characters, and that set the book apart and gave it a little originality even if the plot was shite. Garcia instead goes the mirror image route here and all it did was annoy me.

It didn't, however, annoy me as much as all the fantasy novel wallowing and referencing, because part of this book's stupid plot (why are both of the Origins books so idiotic plot-wise?) was a heavy reliance on a Michael Moorcock book. Stormbringer, which I have not read, is apparently about magic soul-swallowing swords, and while it's clear Garcia is a fan of monstrous proportions she has succeeded in putting me off the prospect of reading it, perhaps for life. Agent of Chaos makes Stormbringer sound absolutely asinine, and whenever it got dragged into the text here my eyes rolled harder than Scully's at the Fiji Mermaid.

Very well-written but extremely depressing story of a young black girl set during the American revolutionary war. Stories about slavery are never going to be happy ones - slavery is simply too horrible for that - but they're worth reading nevertheless, and this is a time period that I haven't seen covered before.

When I do read a book about slavery in the US, it seems to be set during the civil war, so this was new ground for me. And new history, which is both disappointing and fantastic at once. The latter because I like learning new things, and the former because what's learned is really pretty awful. There are very few good characters in this (by that I mean characters who act like decent people). Isabel, her little sister Ruth, Isabel's friend Curzon... that's pretty much it. Everyone else is varying degrees of awful. And what Anderson makes clear - what I'll be taking away more than anything else from this book - is that the awfulness was widely present on both sides. Both the Americans and the British had their own approaches to slavery during the war, and neither of them had the interests of people like Isabel at heart. She's betrayed by all sides, repeatedly, and the hypocrisy of the conflict around her - the desire for freedom for some and not others - is made very, very plain. There is a happy-ish ending, which I will not spoil, and I understand some sequels exist. Though to be honest I don't care about the sequels. I just wanted to see Mrs. Lockton get hers. Alas, it's probably more realistic that consequences felt by monsters like herself are few. But damn it all, there are times I don't want realism and would rather have deserving characters burnt alive in their beds. It'd only be justice.

There's some lovely bright watercolour illustrations in this, and the story's simple but nice. A family loses their home to a fire, and while they're able to restock a new apartment thanks to the kindness of friends and family, they're missing a comfortable chair. So everyone chips in their spare change over time, until the jar's full of enough cash to buy said chair. Not very exciting, perhaps, but sweet and quiet and not over-saccharine. (The illustrations are the best things about it.)

Oh, this is fun. A family of mice move into a new neighbourhood, and get a dinner invitation from the cat next door. (I'm sure you can see where this is going.) You can also see the twist, because when the mice ask to bring a guest the story relies on the assumption that this guest is another tasty, sausage-named mouse. Small kids are likely to fall for that but I'm not, so no surprises there either. But I don't mind, because the illustrations are so entertaining, and the story-telling itself so zippy and slyly amusing, that presentation ends up being far more important than plot. As is frequently the case with picture books, to be fair.

Likeable little story about a department store bear looking for a home. Of course he gets one - I don't think that's a spoiler, really, given that this is a picture book for small children - even though he's missing a button and his attempts to thieve one from the mattresses on the furniture floor fails. I do like him a little better for his attempted larceny, even so.

What an awful little book - almost as bad as that horrifying story, The Giving Tree. Poor wee George is taken by a poacher, essentially - oh, he's not called a poacher, he's too high-class for that, but it's essentially the same thing. George is destined for the zoo, and on the way he nearly drowns, is put in jail, hangs from balloons at risk of a falling death, and all this is presented as Silly George, What Fun!

Never mind, Georgie. Planet of the Apes is coming and then you'll get yours.