octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

The thing about reading science books from times gone past (in this case 6+ decades ago) is that the science, especially if it's in a fast-moving field like evolution, is frequently out of date. The book's wrong, is what I'm saying. That doesn't mean it lacks value from a history-of-science standpoint, though. And really, that's a thematically accurate judgement. Science is a self-correcting method, and it's only by exploring dead ends that we can establish that they are in fact dead ends, and get on to something closer to accurate. I liked reading this book because it was interesting, but three stars shouldn't be taken as endorsement of accuracy.

That inaccuracy is spurred on not only by the state of knowledge at time of writing, but by the author's religious bias. de Chardin was a scientist, but he was also a priest, and he admits himself, towards the end of the book, that had his faith not been what it was he very likely wouldn't have come up with this theory (which, naturally acts in support of said faith). Source of inspiration doesn't necessarily prove a theory wrong - the structure of benzene, for instance, was deduced from a dream of the Ouroboros snake - but the bias is there, and it's influencing the science. de Chardin's theory, in a nutshell, is that evolution is rising to the point of perfecting humanity's spiritual state, and though he doesn't bring Christianity into the book directly, not until the very end, its influence is clearly there from the beginning, and it's causing de Chardin to gloss over steps. One of his frequent rhetorical flourishes is to state something like "We are agreed that..." at which point I stop and say aloud, "I am not agreed!" because he hasn't put forward sufficient evidence to convince me, but there it is. Science is method and experiment. He puts forward no method. He describes no experiment. The thesis of his book is "this is what I have observed, and here is how I have reasoned that my observations can fit in with my religion". Again, it's an interesting theory... but he doesn't have the evidence.

Ugh. You know, the historical aspect of this is mildly interesting - the kids investigate a mystery with its roots in the American Revolutionary War when they find old flintlocks hidden under the woodshed - but the opening is so unpleasant it spoilt the whole thing for me. Aunt Jane is moving back east, getting away from the uranium mine no doubt, so she doesn't spend the remainder of her life glowing and turning mutant. And of course Grandfather Alden, the old bastard, has to remind everyone of how stupid she was to stay there in the first place, when back in the day he, as her younger brother, decided she should move back east with him and left her to starve when she wouldn't jump on command. She was so stubborn, everyone agrees, but now that she's doing what she's told she's much better now. Again I say it: ugh.

There's a small side track about how no-one wants to live in the Alden's old farmhouse, which Grandfather has bought for Jane now that she's knuckled under. It's shades of a haunted house story, but I reckon, historical explanation aside, it's because the whole place was permeated with Grandfather's smug nastiness and his whole horrible miasma drove every subsequent owner away.

There's something so distinctly uncomfortable about this story. And I don't just mean the rescue and reproductive enslavement by aliens after nuclear war. It's in the way that the humans react to those aliens. Yes, there's rebellion and that's perfectly normal under the circumstances, I would imagine - the loss of control is profound. It's the revulsion that so undercuts my experience of science fiction. Lilith, like the other humans, is instinctively, enormously repulsed by the appearance of the aliens, tentacled and sort-of-sea-creature-like as they are. It's instant phobia, and being raised on science fiction that prioritises a sense of wonder when dealing with the alien, and positive wonder at that... well. The Ooloi may have developed themselves a sort of Vulcan IDIC philosophy, but Butler's depiction of humans as so absolutely insular in their reactions is really discomforting. No surprise that, in this world, they manage to almost kill off the entire planet, but I'm left to wonder... is this how we'd react to intelligent extra-terrestrial species? If the aliens of Dawn had come in more peaceful times, would they have been received differently? But then, if humans were capable of more peaceful times, of acceptance of the other, they wouldn't need to be rescued by said aliens in the first place.

Discomfort, too, lies in the fact that although these aliens are doing hideous things, it becomes a whole lot easier to identify with them than it does to identify with Lilith's human companions, who come to typify every worst elements of our species. There's a sort of muted horror all around here, rooted very carefully in the biology of difference and symbiosis, and how Butler keeps this story so very rooted in margins and ambiguity is just so very clever. A really challenging read, and well worth it.

The Gormenghast books are one of my all-time favourite fantasy series. I can't count the number of times I've read this opening volume, but I've just finished reading it again so here we are. It's a monstrous, grotesque, ridiculous, overwritten mutant of a book but I love it anyway, Dickensian Gothic as it is. I just find it extraordinarily entertaining. Original and highly imaginative, it's the characters (castle as well as cast) that make this book so wonderful. I'd love to spend a month or so exploring the sprawling mass of Gormenghast castle, the best castle in all of fantasy lit, but as always I am completely incapable of picking a favourite character. They're all so bizarrely attractive: Flay with his constantly cracking knees, Nannie Slagg with her ancient whiny speech, Countess Gertrude with her birds and cats, and the creepy twins, who are the cause of what, in this read at least, is my new favourite phrase from Titus Groan: "Cora's voice (like the body of a plaice translated into sound)" by which Peake means flat, and a day later I am still laughing.

I love this book.

A series of lengthy conversations between Campbell and Moyers, on the place of mythology in the past and what it can offer us today. Even edited as this is from a series of television programmes, this is clearly an erudite discussion between two very intelligent people, and it makes a lot of interesting points. Campbell, in particular, is an expert in the subject, able to pull illustrative examples out at the drop of a hat, and he's a wonderful storyteller. But it's just so goddamn repetitive. I honestly feel like this could have been an excellent, focused little book at half the length, but it meanders and repeats itself page after page after page... I'd gone to the library to get Hero with a Thousand Faces but someone had already borrowed it, so I put a hold on and got this instead. I'm still interested in reading Hero, but I'm desperately hoping for a little more concision.

I have to admit that for much of the time I spent reading this, I considered it a three star read. I mean it's entertaining enough - Christie's prose is as smooth as ever, and if I don't quite find Poirot retiring to a little country village to grow marrows especially convincing, it's still amusing. Then came the ending, and suddenly the whole book rearranged itself into something startlingly clever. I am not startlingly clever, at least not with mysteries. Most of the time I never know whodunit until I'm told. But just as Poirot started the final explanation the light dawned, and I was almost afraid to read further, in case the dawning wasn't true, and the murderer more prosaic than they were. (You see I am trying to preserve the mystery myself, lest this review spoil a 90+ year old book.) No wonder this is put forward as one of the finest in the genre...

I love reading books that have recipes intertwined into the story, and despite the fact that I don't eat meat the food here still sounds all so mouth-watering. Except perhaps the rose-and-quail recipe, because to be honest as far as I'm concerned rose flavour belongs in Turkish Delight and not much else. But the cream fritters sound delicious.

Food aside, this is a lovely, inventive story about a doomed relationship that comes right in the end. Tita, unable to marry the man who loves her, is reduced to sublimating her feelings through food, and everyone who eats that food responds to it emotionally, in the best of magical realism ways. Either they're blowing up and full of farts, or sent into paroxysms of lust, or turning a wedding reception into a vomit-fest and so on. And it's just so entertaining to read. Tita herself is fantastic. I only wish I felt the same about her love interest, Pedro. He's the only thing keeping this delightful book from a five star rating as far as I'm concerned. Tita is far too good for him.

"Really liked it" is a bit of a stretch, but I'm rounding up. I did really like the idea behind this - I'm not entirely convinced by the existence of the mono-myth, as it seems like something that can be backed up by cherry-picking, but then I'm not familiar enough with world mythologies to pick out counter-examples. That said, I don't need to agree with every last thing in order to find value in some of the shared symbolism and connections between different mythologies, many of which have influenced (and been influenced by) the stories come from other cultures.

It also feels a bit churlish to complain about the wealth of example that Campbell gives. I can see his problem - when offering up a theory as monumental as this one, more evidence is probably better than less, but it does make it repetitive to wade through. (That bit of a stretch I was talking about earlier was in regard to execution, not concept.) I read Campbell's Power of Myth recently, and had much the same complaint: he does ramble on and on, and there's a lot of woolliness that could be cut away here to make it a more streamlined read. Weary of his need to endlessly explain as I am, though, I would have liked to see more examples from South and Central America and Africa. I think he could have made room by getting rid of some of the examples come from Buddhism - enamoured as he clearly is, I felt as if I were reading the same points over and over there.

I'd been really looking forward to reading this, but although I liked it I was honestly a little disappointed. There's such a fantastic idea here: three novellas, about three generations of captive polar bears. There's nothing realistic about these bears; they are thoroughly anthropomorphised as a writer, a circus performer, and finally a zoo exhibit (the famous, and famously ill-fated Knut of the Berlin Zoo). And there's genuinely something satirical and cutting about how, in each case, the human desire to exploit the bears has shaped their lives, has produced in each case a sort of tragic bear-human hybrid. Because really, if you train a bear, force it to wear clothes and perform, then sooner or later the plasticity of image encouraged - even enforced - by those actions will impact on the behaviour of the bear.

Despite the wittiness of the concept, however, and the excellent and deliberately chosen ambiguities inherent in this entire conceit, the emotional core was absent for me. Admittedly, this is less notable in the Knut sections than in the others; still I often found myself admiring but frequently unmoved. I got very little sense of the emotional lives of these animals, and while I understand it must be difficult to create this while not making them seem identical, in their inner workings, to humans, the result wasn't particularly successful. I felt I was reading a clever book about polar bears, a book that sometimes went to strange and unsuccessful places (the insertion of the Michael Jackson sections seemed an utter waste of time, for instance). Rarely, sadly, did those bears come alive for me.

The first volume of Angelou's autobiography is deservedly famous. Not just for the content, but for the prose. Her prose! It's so restrained and so lovely. I don't read a whole lot of autobiographies, but I think I'm going to have to look up more of them done by poets, because there's such an elegance to the language here. And as someone who reads not only, but substantially, for the beauty of words, this is a wonderful read.

The book covers Angelou's childhood, spent largely (but not entirely) in the American south of the 1930s and 1940s. As a young black girl in what was an enormously racist society, her perceptions of the world around her are simultaneous in their impressions, the text merging her childish groping for understanding with the absolute comprehension of the adult writer. The horror of some of what goes on around her is muted somewhat, primarily by the shielding presence of her grandmother, but it's still seeping beneath every page, and it's enormously affecting. I'm going to have to read the other six volumes...