octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I want to say "What a boring little book!" but then again, I'm hardly the target audience. But then again (again) I'm sure I've seen other picture books that help teach colours and other basic principles without being quite so, I don't know, repetitive? (And kind of dull.) I think if I were a parent and had to read this over and over then it, along with Goodnight Moon, would be going on a bonfire. Although it's not all bad. I like the illustrations, and the focus on dogs, and I did get one genuine laugh out of it. "Do you like my hat?" says one dog to another. "I do not," says the second dog, politely, and it amuses me to think of all the little children, reading this over generations, who have given their decided opinion on other people's clothing because of it.

This was wonderful. A sort of love letter from a boy to his grandfather, and from the grandfather to his home. To both of his homes, one on each side of the Pacific, and how both places stayed with him as he aged. I think a lot of migrants could probably identify with the grandfather here, seeing value and wonder in two different places and not being able to reconcile only being able to stay in one of them at a time. It's a quiet, thoughtful little book, with quiet, lovely illustrations, and it's all so restrained and wistful. I've been reading my way through the 100 Great Children's Books list from the New York Public Library, and I have to say that not all of their picks are ones that I'd agree with. This absolutely deserves to be on there, though, and it was worth reading through any amount of Frog and Toad for.

I'm still enjoying this trilogy, which makes it a nice change from some of the earlier Star Wars tie-ins. It's got more of a sense of scale and shifting currents, and comes across as far less superficial in its treatment of the universe. There's some thought gone into it, is what I'm saying, although I wondered, when reading, if the impact of some of the storylines was lessened a bit by having so many strands and plot points to cover to follow. It's not that the plot is over-complicated, because it isn't, but for all my appreciation of its thoughtfulness the only real emotional beats, for me, were in Leia's storyline, as she discovered how badly the Empire (and Vader) had exploited a race of people, destroying their ecosystem and turning them into slaves. I was interested in the other storylines, but in comparison I didn't really care about them, if that makes sense. Although credit where it's due, Mara Jade was slightly less whiny and annoying this time around.

Not my usual reading material! But it was on a list of auto/biographies I'm working my way through, and I came across a copy so why not. It was an interesting look into an industry from the perspective of one of its producers, and the text is chatty and informative without being exploitative. It's clear the author has affection and respect for both the porn business and the people he works with. And you know what? Jeremy comes across as a pretty decent guy. Which was my first reaction and kind of a prejudiced one, as I think on it, because there's no reason for porn stars to be fundamentally that different from the rest of us. Truth be told, it's not as if I've ever given them a lot of thought before this, and reading about how a kid from an everyday family sort of falls into porn and comes to find value in it provides a genuinely thought-provoking perspective.

I'm sure some people will say that it's a disgraceful account of a disgraceful industry and that the fibre of a community is weakened thereby and so forth, but I've taken a quick look at how people have shelved this book on Goodreads, and, at time of writing, 77 people can't tell the difference between "autobiography" and "biography", and 19 benighted souls have shelved this as "science". That is a far more depressing snapshot if you ask me. At least Jeremy is fucking literate.

One of those rare books that I think is both fantasy and general fiction. It's so beautifully written, too - it would be so easy for a story like this to slide into melodrama, and yet the prose is so quiet, so lovely and contained, that the story is solidly anchored by it. Nor is that story graphically exploitative. The rape and murder of a young girl would be, in the hands of other authors, something grotesquely detailed, but Sebold sensibly shies away from that I think. That it happens at all is horrifying enough; we don't need to see every gory detail of Susie's final moments. Arguably, the detailed description is directed at another horrifying event - one just as affecting, and just as compelling. The fracture and dissolution of Susie's family, in the aftermath of her murder, is the real story here.

From the beginning readers know what happened to her, and know who did it, but how parents and siblings cope (or don't) and go on to find a way to live with their loss is its own long tragedy. That the murder of a child is not the end of that family is though, I think, another good choice on Sebold's part. There's no question that some families don't survive trauma like this. And why should they, it's a nightmare come to life. But that survival, and eventually even happiness, is still possible creates a memorial of a different sort, and one with value. That's a genuinely hopeful thing to read, despite the terribly sad journey it takes to get there.

I do think some aspects of the book aren't perhaps quite as strong as others - Ruth's story, and Ray's, for instance, aren't nearly as interesting to me as that of Lindsey or Abigail, but despite this it's still an excellent book. Four and a half stars, which I'm rounding up to five.

Good grief. How did these books ever get published? Things have taken a severe downturn since the first book in the series. I mean, I read enough of the Trixie Belden books as a kid to know that children's mystery stories aren't too hot on the plausibility side, but these children are playing in a uranium mine!!! Not to mention the chimney of the house in the ranch their great aunt has given them (for no good reason, because these kids aren't rich enough) is made of uranium ore. Granted, these books were written decades ago and perhaps Warner didn't have access to the same level of scientific information that we have today, but they have not aged well. Moreover, this one's got a particularly patronising tone. Great aunt Jane is referred to as "little lady" so often I lost count... even by little Benny, upon meeting her, which now I come to think of it... no wonder she sent him to play in a uranium mine. And the implication that she's at fault for the estrangement with her brother because she didn't want to sell her own home... you can fuck right off, Grandfather Alden, for letting your sister fall into loneliness and poverty and not even trying to help her because she didn't do what you wanted as a young woman.

Safe to say this is the lowlight of the series thus far. How did these things get to be classics again?

It's taken me literally months to read this; it just couldn't hold my attention. Doesn't mean that it's awful - it isn't - but there's not enough character work in here to appeal to me, I think. The basic concept of the book, in a nutshell, is that a giant life-destroying laser beam has been directed at a colony planet that's under the protection of the Enterprise, and Kirk and company have to figure out how to stop it. This sounds like it should be pretty exciting, and credit where it's due the last 20 odd pages actually are exciting - at least mildly so. But for the most part all I remember of this book, having only just finished it, is a tendency to technobabble. Star Trek is fairly notorious for this, I know, but I've never thought it's done much in service of story and that's the case here.

Note: the edition I actually read was The Screwtape Letters: includes Screwtape Proposes a Toast, which is the same book, albeit with an extra chapter added at the end so therefore it apparently gets a different record on Goodreads. Which seems marginal to me, but there you go. I've just copied my review of the longer edition into this one, basically for my own records.

Starting on the Book Riot 2019 Read Harder challenge with this - I'm using it to tick off the epistolary novel/collection of letters task. And it's a fun book! Dear old Uncle Screwtape scribbling away in hell, trying to lecture his nephew into corrupting competence, and ultimately failing because said nephew, amongst other things, is just not too bright. The whole thing's very tongue-in-cheek, an argument for Christianity that Lewis cloaks in mirrors and opposites. And it's all very clever, but I can't help but think while reading that for all his observations about humans existing in time, the most interesting and effective parts of the book are those where he uses very simple examples. For instance the elderly lady, determined to give everyone trouble by being subversively gluttonous regarding her dietary choices - weak tea and toast that has to be just so and that no-one can ever get right, no matter how much of their attention she focuses on her "simple" needs. It's a really cutting piece of satire, easily recognisable and blazingly effective as illustration, and I only wish Lewis (and Screwtape) had spent less letter time wallowing in the abstract and more on writing stuff like this.

I realise that rating systems necessarily have to be simple to be useful, but it does feel awkward giving this three stars, knowing that, on Goodreads, three stars means "I liked it". I didn't like it. It's a memoir of child abuse. There is nothing likeable about what Pelzer describes. His parents - the both of them - are monsters. I'd rather not give them more attention than that. Keeping focus on the writing: Pelzer's prose is vivid and affecting. Memoirs, more than autobiographies, are meant to evoke feeling and that's what this does. I'm not entirely sure the structure of it worked for me, however. Putting the escape at the beginning does allow you to read through the rest with some sense of reassurance, but it also means the book is largely grim and ends grim. I understand this is the first in a series, but I've never appreciated cliffhangers and still don't, really. Had it ended with Pelzer's teachers helping to free him from the abuse the whole sweep of narrative would have married better with the emotional journey of the memoir, I think.

I think one of the most interesting things about the edition that I read is the amount of end material - a number of short pieces from different people mentioned in the book. Foster parents, teachers, care workers... it's really valuable to get all these different perspectives, and hats off to all those people for doing what must often be an excruciatingly difficult job. And it's clear from reading Pelzer's story that he can't have been easy to deal with as a teenager. Not his fault, you can't expect a kid to recover from trauma at the flick of a switch, and after all he basically had to learn to perceive and navigate the world from scratch. But what struck me was the amount of repetition in the book. This can feel a little frustrating to read, and I can only imagine how much more frustrating it was for Pelzer and his support system to live through - a sort of two steps forward, one step backwards pattern that lasts throughout his adolescence. The tone's a little lighter in this volume, though, which is a relief. As bad as some of Pelzer's experiences are in this book, at least he's away from his awful fucking parents. How he can retain any sympathy or compassion for his awful, enabling father is a mystery to me, though.