octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Much better than the first in the series. The story felt more cohesive to me, with less frenetically stuffed in action for the hell of it. Which is not to say this isn't also action-packed, but the action here tends to be a little more in service of the story than the reverse. I'm all for popcorn reads, but I like a book to be more than a series of special-effects-in-prose. This still has its share of action silliness - Chewbacca making a hang-glider out of a dead pterodactyl springs to mind - but there's nothing as egregiously dumb as the tower-shot-into-space of the last book. There's less attention on the boring droids and other supporting (and ephemeral) cast here as well - the focus is more solidly on Han, which allows for a bit of character work, adding to the greater likeability of this volume. I'd still like to see more focus on his friendship with Chewie, but in general Daley's decision to strip back the moving parts a bit has paid off.

Heir to a creepy house goes to live in said house and starts hearing creepy noises in the creepy walls. It's rats. Ghost rats, apparently, and I don't think I'm giving away anything there considering it's in the damn title. Ghost rats deriving from... well. That would be the spoiler. And, you know, I hate rats. They creep me out. So I was expecting to be disturbed, and I was, and then the end came and the story fell apart. Disturbance doesn't survive side-eye I can tell you. It reminds me very much, actually, of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. Not so much in the subject matter, but in the spin-on-a-dime turn of the narrator into insanity. It's so quick that it just doesn't seem believable.

It gets an extra point for the early atmosphere, though. I'd give another extra point for the cat surviving, but the story had already lost a point for the cat's name (fucking Lovecraft) so it balanced out there at least.

This book makes me feel old, and as if I have lost all my imagination. I can't help it - it's all just so wrong! I absolutely cannot turn off my environmentalist self, which says both that establishing a colony of penguins in the Arctic could wreak untold ecological damage and that making said penguins perform in music halls is not a kind or appropriate way to treat them.

I have the feeling that this story is from the same era as that monstrous little book Curious George, and while the penguins at least have some funny moments - proving that I've not lost all sense of amusement - I'm still shaking my head at this piece of juvenile what-the-fuckery.

More and more these stories seem to be about Benny, with the rest of the family there as backdrop. He's marginally less annoying than usual in this one though, so that's something. Anyway, in this latest instalment, the most spoilt children in the world go on a caboose trip. It's a callback of sorts to the Boxcar, which was infinitely more charming, but this one has a clown, a talking horse, and a missing diamond necklace, hidden in said caboose. And all I can think is that the police who searched the caboose looking for said necklace must have been the laziest detectives ever, because not only did they miss the postcard tacked up on a wall (which gave the clue to the location of the necklace), they also missed the necklace itself, which was hidden in the most obvious place ever. Still, I suppose you need an idiot plot if you want to make Benny look clever...

Apparently this is classed as one of Shakespeare's comedies, but I didn't find it that funny - although granted, Shakespeare's tendency to think of people fooling other people by dressing up as different people as being side-splittingly funny is something on which we differ. (I always end up thinking these idiots need glasses.) This strikes me as more of a drama.

Regardless, there's some fantastic stuff here - pretty much everything related to the trial, rather than the romances. Shylock's speech "Hath not a Jew eyes?" is an outstanding argument against bigotry, and in arguing for the quality of mercy, Portia is far more compelling than when she's fooling her blind idiot husband or seeing off a bunch of suitors. There's no getting away from the fact, though, that Shylock's the stand-out character of the play. He's kind of an anti-hero, and I don't want him to win, exactly, but I can't say that I'm all that excited to stand up for Antonio either. The last was stupid enough to make a bad bargain, and his clear history of anti-Semitic behaviour (he's more than happy to generally abuse Shylock before he needed him) is not endearing. He strikes me very much as a Ye Old Venetian version of the guy who treats his friends well but is a dick to the waiter, so frankly if all his flesh were carved off I can't see it being that much of a loss.

I was interested to read, in the introduction, that performances of this play have frequently ended after the fourth act - the act in which we see the last of Shylock. The reasoning being that once the most compelling character is gone the last act is just anticlimactic milquetoast wind-up, and you know what? They're not wrong.

I understand from Wikipedia that the stories and various narratives collected here are based off Kentish legends, and they do have the feel of old stories retold, a lot of them. Most of the retellings are done in poetry form, but there are quite a few short stories interspersed. What the author, taking on the mantle of a member of the Ingoldsby family (which supposedly supplies bit players for most of the legends) does is retell these stories fairly tongue-in-cheek. His morals, especially (he likes to end his poems with morals) are particularly snarky, and were often the most entertaining part. Still, it took me ages to wade through. There's a lot of characters in here who get a (literal) boot up the arse, and did I ever want to give one to Ingoldsby, along with a hearty "Get on with it!" There's just so much waffle - he goes off on tangents, and they're lengthy and often repetitive, and because all his poetry is rhyming it often has to be massaged very heavily to fit, which can be awkward. Honestly, I'm interested in the legends (well, some of them) but I think I'd rather read a straight prose retelling. He's not funny enough to be this long-winded.

Really interesting - and very sad - collection of letters sent to Moore by American soldiers and some of their family members during the Iraq War. It's fair to say that all letters here are very supportive of his anti-war stance, though it's notable how many of the letter writers admit to being, at one time, both pro-war and anti-Moore. Most of the soldiers writing are very young, and it's easy to feel sympathy for them. They've been recruited, mostly, because they've got few other options - that armed forces tend to recruit their cannon fodder from the poor and poorly educated is no new thing. Yet I have to admit I was shocked at how little thought some of them seemed to have put into joining up. And it sounds terrible to say that, like I'm victim-blaming, but I can't help but think that there's a whole lot of other victims here (the ones these soldiers signed up to fight)... and while some of the letters show concern for the Iraqi civilians whose lives were absolutely shattered by that poorly thought-out war, they're in a distinct minority. There's a lot more of "I can't believe I have to go over there now, I'm afraid and I don't want to live like that", and, fair enough, people put themselves first and their own lives are more immediately concerning to them, but still. Young as they are signing up, do none of them consider the fact that they're signing up to kill other people? The few soldiers who talk about seeing dead kids in the streets with their legs shot off... what did they think was going to happen to Iraqi children when they went over there? And then I think some of those letter writers are barely more than children themselves... they talk about being recruited at 17, for goodness sake. It's appalling. The whole thing is deeply bizarre... and frankly very depressing.

It's depressing because so many of the people, in this book, are saying "It'll be different after the election". They're so certain that Bush won't be re-elected, that his piss-poor performance, his incompetence and greed, will be enough for the American electorate to vote him out. Of course it wasn't. And 15 years on, America's got another war-happy plutocratic moron in power and I look over at the citizens there and think "They're going to elect him again", because sadly I wasn't surprised when they did it the first time. So, yeah. Depressing on multiple levels, because nothing seems to change.

I don't know what it is about Forster. He writes about the most unpleasant people, and yet I'm riveted despite myself. Not that the two sisters here are unpleasant, for the most part, but Henry Wilcox has one of the most unflattering portraits of a "good" man ever to have been written, I think. (I don't know how Margaret stands him.) I put good in quote marks there because Forster's style, as in A Passage to India, is both so cutting and so observant that the object of his description is not only sliced to pieces, but every single smug, petty hypocrisy, every bit of unkind and wilful ignorance, is on full display. Forster seems to have a particular talent for skewering, especially, the upper middle-class male of his time. His women tend to be slightly more aware, I suppose if only because they have to suffer and placate these fools while constantly being told of their own inferiority by them, but still. It's an extremely unflattering portrait of society, as I said.

And, as with Passage, the main thrust of the narrative seems to be the characters who are groping, if even somewhat dimly, for a life beyond the anodyne. They want more, they want to connect to something beyond themselves, and yet they're frequently stuck in environments where such a connection is an active social disadvantage, and causes them to be seen with suspicion or condescension, even contempt. Yet they keep trying. I suppose that's admirable, and admittedly it pays off for them slightly more here than it ever did in India.

This is the best of the series since the first book! It's still pretty basic, and the girls are still stuck with all the housework (do your own damn washing, Benny!), but the magic words have finally been learnt: "Oh, I'm awfully sorry," said Benny. "It's none of my business." It's like the child is finally cottoning on to the idea of manners. I know. I'm shocked too. Of course it doesn't last, but still. Baby steps.

I liked the focus on nature as they were boating down the river. I liked that, while they were curious, the kids only really got into solving the mystery when they were faced with horses who weren't being fed enough. I liked that there were actually some competent adults in on solving the mystery for once, and that Benny chose to keep out of the final capture because he was more interested in feeding the horses than capturing the villains. I do wish, though, that the girls would get something interesting to do themselves rather than worry about food and clothing, but 12 books in and I don't think that's ever going to happen. Warner just doesn't seem that interested in them.

Fun children's follow-up to The Boggart, but like its predecessor it doesn't match up to Cooper's absolutely fantastic The Dark is Rising series. Still, if it's fairly slight it's still likeable enough, and there's a really interesting take on the Loch Ness monster that I haven't seen before. I won't spoil it here, but the Boggart takes centre stage dealing with the monster, and develops into a far more communicative character than he was the last time around. I'm not entirely sure whether I prefer him this way or the last, though - giving the Boggart the power to speak goes some way to making him seem more accessible and human-like, but that necessarily means a loss of the magic and alien nature that made him appealing in the first place.