octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Simple little book about colours for very early readers. There's no real plot or anything, but what saves this from dullness are the illustrations, which are really well done. Each different type of train car is a different colour, and as the train moves faster and faster through the different tracks, the colours blur together to form an almost-rainbow (in rainbow order, except the last colour is black instead of violet). So it gets an extra point for that, because when the text is this unembellished there needs to be something about the art to compensate.

An enormous, sprawling novel about a group of American soldiers fighting in the Pacific in WW2. It's one of those books that goes into the "admire but didn't really like" pile. I can see what Mailer's trying to do, and credit where it's due he can be very effective. This is a deeply cynical take on war, one that does its best to show the dehumanisation of the individual soldiers, the waste and effect that war has on them. In this The Naked and the Dead is successful. It is also deeply monotonous.

It has taken me months, literally months, to get through this. I had to push myself to finish it. 700+ pages, and the tone does not vary. It takes a dozen odd characters and strips them down with (and to) varying degrees of nastiness. Mailer was drawing on his own wartime experiences, or so I understand, so there's likely a high degree of realism in here, but for all the adequacies of the characterisation, those characters were unlikeable and I didn't care at all what happened to them. It didn't much help that their attitudes all tended to coalesce as the book stumped its way on - yes, I get that this is part of the theme, reducing individuals to cogs in the military machine, but Mailer could have done that with fewer characters and half the page count. I'm not giving it one star because there are interesting aspects, and the working intelligence behind all these moving parts is clear. I only wish that intelligence had come with an editing function.

A really enjoyable collection of poetry, based around a number of different fairy tales. While not as overtly feminist and confronting as Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, for instance (Sexton's retellings certainly stay closer to the original or the Grimm versions than "The Company of Wolves" does) they're still distinctly modernised, often working around the fairy tale theme with contemporary allusions and imagery. Sexton's use of language in this way is sometimes startling, but that's part of the charm, I think. And while I like all of the poems - the collection's a pleasure to read - I think my favourite is "Briar Rose", the Sleeping Beauty retelling: "Consider / a girl who keeps slipping off, / arms limp as old carrots, / into the hypnotist's trance, / into a spirit world / speaking with the gift of tongues..."

First published in 1865, this really interesting study on the werewolf is notable for what it doesn't show. Ask a random person on the street today what they know about werewolves, and the answer will generally involve silver bullets and a full moon, but the mythos of earlier centuries is very different indeed.

Baring-Gould's assessment of the phenomenon comes from a place of rationalism - it is clear he ascribes symptoms of lycanthropy to mental illness rather than supernatural effect. However the folklore, legends and myths of lycanthropy - and how they appear in history (in the recorded criminal trials of those affected, for example) - describe populations and cultures where this rationalism was very far from a satisfactory explanation for the people involved.

I understand that this children's novel is based in part on the author's childhood, and it's a likeable enough read although very old-fashioned. In a way it's kind of sweet, that all these sisters get so excited about going to the beach or the library, or that chapters can be constructed of them choosing which sweets to spend their penny of pocket money on - a very gentle story, told with kindness. What saves it from being honestly a little dull is that the family is Jewish, and details of their religious celebrations and customs are interwoven into the text. I don't know a great deal about Judaism, so a lot of this was new and interesting to me, and I enjoyed learning about the culture these kids were living in. Admittedly, given that this book is aimed at very young children the exploration of that culture is not particularly in-depth, but there's enough here to give a real sense of what their lives were like.

I like the rhyme scheme here, I really do, but that cat is the most annoying horrible animal. I suppose that's the point, but I begin to think these children should start investing in a shotgun and some bullets. Else it's ulcers for them, and before they turn ten.

Very loosely based, according to the afterword, on the life of Ryan's grandmother, Esperanza Rising tells of a young girl, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, who is forced to leave her home when her father dies and her dodgy uncles take over. Esperanza and her mother immigrate from Mexico to the US in the time of dustbowls and depression, and eke out a living on the California farms, picking fruit, working in the pack-houses, that sort of thing. It's a big adjustment for both of them, especially Esperanza, and there are times in the first half of the book where she induces exasperation as well as pity. It's not her fault that her privileged childhood left her so unsuited for a life of work and poverty, but she can be so thoughtlessly snobbish towards the people trying to help her - former servants of her family. But as is expected, given this book is for children, Esperanza learns useful skills and the value of work, taking on extra responsibilities in order to look after her sick mother, and becomes a more productive and considerate person in general.

More interesting - because we basically know how Esperanza's story will go from the beginning - is the treatment of strikes and forced repatriation. I wouldn't call this book The Grapes of Wrath for kids, exactly, but it doesn't shy away from the political side of labour, and how difficult it was for people to support themselves and their families - how easy they were to exploit, and how race played into that exploitation. It's a great way to introduce kids to that part of history, though, and I imagine this book could spark some interesting discussions in classrooms.

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. This is a lot of fun - two kids run away from home, but they're running toward as much as away... toward the Metropolitan Art Museum, and they squat there for the better part of a week, dodging security guards and learning as much about art as they can. Because naturally, dogging the footsteps of docents is the best thing to do if you're a kid on the lam. They're such enjoyable children to read about, too, and the whole thing's so entertaining. I love that they think they've solved the puzzle about the Michelangelo statue and it turns out, nope, all the competent adults already know the information the kids have discovered, ha! So often stories like these turn all characters over 12 into shambling idiots but here everyone is an art nerd and they're all interested in sculpture together. The book does skim rather unbelievably over the whole deal with the poor parents (whose only crime seems to be making the ungrateful duo do chores like setting the table for dinner, the horror!) but to be fair, I'm more interested in what's going on in the museum too.

A really very interesting series of essays on how feminism, sexuality, and disability interact. This is not a field I have any real background in, certainly no academic background, and initially this was a little heavy-going. It is an academic text, after all, and whenever Kafer focused on more general approaches to the topic - such as in the introduction, for instance - I needed to pay close attention to be able to follow. The book got a whole lot easier to read once Kafer got into specifics, into what I suppose you'd call applied work, or at least a theoretical critique of applied work. Particularly interesting were the chapters on Ashley X (a disabled child who underwent treatment both to sterilise her and to stunt her growth, keeping her effectively child-sized for life) and inspirational billboards (how disability is marketed as a challenge people can overcome). I think I was most engaged by the chapter on environmentalism, though, and how disabled people were able to access (or not access) national parks - being very fond of national parks myself I'd never even considered not being able to experience them in the way that I do. And I suppose that has been the real take-away of this book for me: it's challenged my underlying perceptions about disability, about how I perceive it, and if I don't always agree with all the points the author makes, I found myself nodding along and convinced by the majority. It's a question of empathy and fairness, really.

Not the first time I've read this, and it does feel rather like a novella and a short novel lumped together, but that's alright, I still enjoyed it. I like the cleverness of it, the constant faking out of the Second Foundation (does it exist? where is it, exactly?) but towards the end it felt a little as if the well was running dry. You can only read "I know where it is! No I don't..." so many times before your ability to care starts to dry up as well. If I were rating on cleverness alone, this would likely be a four star read, but for me the characterisation drags it down a little. The Mule is always a fascinating figure, but he's long dead for most of this - the bulk of the story taking place a couple of generations after his time - and with the exception of Arcadia, all the other characters are pretty thinly drawn. And yeah, I get this is a series that relies on concept, on being unashamedly idea fiction, but when I can only manage to give a damn about one of a cast of a dozen or so, all the intelligence in the world can't fill the gap.