octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I found this deeply entertaining and very funny, and yet despite seeing how this paid off for Wallace I have no desire to try it for myself. Thing is, I realise it might actually benefit me in some ways. I say no a lot. That certainly has its effect. Frankly, though, the thought of being forced (for example) to socialise at every random invitation has absolutely no appeal. I'm exhausted thinking about it... I suspect that Wallace is less of an introvert than I am. But I think this book's strength is not that it's saying "You must go out and say Yes at every level, without discrimination", because even the author doesn't do that. It's more that you can get into a rut, and that being both open-minded and open to new experiences can be enriching. And that I've no argument with. To put it on a book level - because this is a book site, and most people here are obsessed with reading - it's what I've been trying to do more of lately. I tend to read speculative fiction - fantasy and sci-fi and horror, and I read a lot of it. A LOT. But if you only read in very limited genres, you miss a great deal of other interesting things. So, trawling through the Goodreads list function as I so often do for entertainment (hey, it's better than tv) I find myself clicking on random lists and tucking them away in my favourites folder... and then reading through them, no matter how bizarre they are. Because there's some fascinating and wonderful books out there, and some deeply terrible ones as well, granted, but I find myself making connections between them and thinking new things and that's immensely valuable if you like thinking in general, which I do.

So basically, this book is an argument for treating life like a Goodreads book list, and it's something worth doing. Some of the time, at least. I'm still not going to any fucking parties, though.

Pride and Prejudice is one of my favourite books of all time, so I was delighted to come across this. And it was well worth reading - the writing is so accomplished, and so beautiful. There's a very understated restraint here, and it's all the more effective given that some of the narrative choices veer into melodrama. (A pity it couldn't have pulled back a bit more there as well.) Basically, though, this is a parallel narrative to the original, told from the point of view of the servants. And I have to say, that's a monstrously effective choice. Life as a housemaid - Sarah, one of the two housemaids, is the main protagonist here - is hard and exploitative and full of backbreaking labour, and Baker doesn't shy away from all the unglamorous, ugly parts of the role.

But what this different perspective does is alter, and play with, the judgements we've already made of the Pride and Prejudice characters. Elizabeth Bennet, for example, that perennial favourite, tends to get a great deal of modern approval for her love of outdoor walks and tramping through mud, but as Sarah thinks, her hands raw and bleeding from laundry and lye soap, if Elizabeth had the washing of her own clothes she'd be more careful with them. There's something so deeply careless, so thoughtless, about dumping even more work on an underling who's already staggering under the load and not even noticing... but of course we know Elizabeth didn't notice, or if she did she didn't care.

Baker, in this novel, is particularly good at this sort of upended expectation. The characters most often mocked and laughed at - Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Collins, Mary and Lydia - are treated with the sympathy and understanding that comes from a character who also lives on the difficult margins, while the faults of characters like Elizabeth and (especially) Mr. Bennet are recognised and magnified. (Not to worry, though, Wickham and Lady Catherine are worse than ever, so it's not totally topsy-turvy.) But the whole is very well-done, and a fascinating inversion of a well-loved story.

Rating books is serious business. I agonise over this shit, I tell you, and not only because I think a future artificial intelligence version of me might be cobbled together primarily out of book reviews. (1200+ at this point; that's a lot of data.) But I've been wavering over this collection of three novellas for some time now, wondering whether to give it 3 or 4 stars, and I've settled on 3.5, rounding up because I have to here.

The best part of this book, by far, is the descriptions of nature. They make up a large part of the stories, and they are genuinely beautiful. Maclean has a real gift for writing about the natural world - a quiet, observant style that's still alive with the perception of beauty and wonder around him. It's utterly fantastic. I'd read his nature writing till the cows come home. Unfortunately I couldn't keep up that level of interest when he got off nature writing. Those fly fishing descriptions, nature-adjacent as they were, were endless. Similarly with long pages on poker and cribbage in the final novella. I kept wanting him to shift back to the river and mountains, and stop banging on about drunken fights and card games...

I don't know what I expected of this book, but I wasn't really expecting to enjoy it. You see, I hate rats. Hate them. They've done nothing to me, poor things, apart from being in the most horrifying passage of Nineteen Eighty-Four ever and given my child-self a subsequent loathing for life which is quite unreasonable I know, but still. Those horrible tails. I can't with them.

But this is a fantasy book about rats, and they're not rats really. A stint in an animal testing lab has turned them into people. Oh, they're still rat shaped, but they're literate now, and conversational, and capable of using electricity to light their burrows, and having moral conundrums on the best way to live their best life so, you know, people. And they're all very very kind to a poor widowed mouse who is trying to save her small son from pneumonia and ploughing (which now that I type it, sounds a whole lot more sinister than it is). And that makes them enjoyable. Compelling even, and I enjoy books where characters are both kind and compelling.

Edit: bloody hell, I have just realised. The author who wrote this is the same author who wrote that awful misanthropic piece of shit Z for Zachariah, and I don't know what terrible thing happened to him to sour his faith in people but clearly something did, because that book and every person in it was just hateful.

This is awful. It's just not very well-written, not on any level. Every single character reads like a caricature, but the worst by far is the captain. Calhoun seems to be presented as an outstanding individual, but it's all tell and no show, because mostly his role seems to be to have snarky conversations (which are neither funny nor impressive) and to be proved immediately correct whenever one of his subordinates disagrees with him. As for those subordinates, his first officer, Shelby, is almost as cringe-inducing. A former lover, she's been placed in the role of babysitter to this unpleasant supposed iconoclast, which isn't entertaining in the slightest.

Really, the whole thing is just depressingly superficial. It wouldn't rise to competence on Ao3.

What a fantastic cover this edition has! That stained glass window is beautiful. The people this book describes, however... are not. That is, many of them are supposed to be very physically attractive - Eleanor herself was supposed to be the great looker of her time - but my goodness she and Henry II spawned some shitty people. The sons in particular are all awful. I'm aware that royal children of the time were often separated from their mum and dad for the period of their raising, and Eleanor certainly spends a lot of time separated from her 10 kids, but given that all her sons, bar the one who died in infancy, were such terrible people... the parents have to take some responsibility, is all I'm saying. The people of England and France were in dire need of a guillotine. It's amazing any of them survived the constant warfare their greedy, vicious, supremely selfish and untrustworthy leaders inflicted on them.

Eleanor herself is a fascinating character. I'd known practically nothing about her before reading this book, but Weir puts together a very well-researched and well-written book, so I'm feeling a bit less ignorant. Given that Eleanor lived so long ago, there are a number of gaps in the record, but Weir makes the best of what she has to work with. Her approach is relatively sympathetic to Eleanor herself and mostly objective towards the rest, but I'm so disgusted at the actions of the entire dreadful family that I could have done with a bit more judgement, to be honest.

Not quite as good as the last one. As a sequel, it's just more overwrought, and if you strip away all the melodramatic detail, every basic beat of the plot was fairly predictable. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed it, but apparently there are six books in the series and I'm already fed up with everyone's complete and total inability to just put a bullet into the head of Gretchen Lowell. There are plenty of opportunities to actually stop this sadistic murderer in her tracks but no-one ever takes them. So Archie will die if you shoot her in the head? Let him die! One person - and a fairly dodgy one at that, though I suppose it's hardly surprising given he's so surrounded by crooks, surely it's rubbed off - is a bargain compared to the literal hundreds Lowell would slaughter if left alive. These people, I swear. I want to reach into the pages and give them all a good slap... with the sole exception of Archie's ex-wife Debbie, who seems to be the only sane person here. And she's got a healthy sense of self-preservation and self-respect, too... I hope she takes the kids and ditches Archie for good. He can wallow in his masochistic trauma all he likes then, and let's face it, he's actively enjoying it - and NOT knocking off the serial killer when he has the chance - so I can't say I care that much about him ruining his life even further.

Grandfather Alden, looking for some peace, packs his kids off to a remote cabin for a week, where they pore over the guestbook and make judgmental comments about other visitors who also bring their families to said cabin. Anyway, it pretty much goes on as all the Boxcar mysteries do, but this one's even more food-obsessed than the rest, as the mystery this time revolves around a lost recipe. There is a truly disgusting reference, however, to a culinary monstrosity of which I had not heard before - a whole chicken in a can. Bones and everything. Now granted I'm a vegetarian so chicken doesn't fill me with delight at the best of times, but come on. That just sounds really repulsive. And honestly kind of slimy...

It's fairly basic, occasionally repetitive, and because the book was published 50 odd years ago some of the content in here is out of date, but it's still an interesting - and I think successful - example of the science communication of the day. Particularly physics communication. (This was sold as a science book, but biology gets a grudging 10% of entries.) Nonetheless it's got a simple and well-organised structure. There are 100 basic questions, covering concepts like imaginary numbers, solar wind, the uncertainty principle and so forth, and each has a short, clear answer. It's obviously written for laypeople (these were originally a series of columns in a magazine), and so the language is simple and the analogies usefully non-technical. The example of people moving in a grid to illustrate the link between entropy and order, for instance, was particularly effective.

I was so torn on whether to give this four or five stars! But I ended the book too worried about the abandoned cats and other animals for full marks, I think. It's a wonderful read, though. Wise Child is a somewhat bratty character, or at least starts out that way. But when her grandmother dies and she is taken in by the village witch, there's no more spoiling - or there is, but not quite in the same way. Picture a slightly nicer Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden put into the care of a much nicer, sugar sweet version of Granny Weatherwax, and the kid starts to improve a great deal, even becoming interested in witchcraft herself. But then there's a bad winter, and an outbreak of smallpox, and the pig-ignorant priest starts pointing fingers and the inquisition gets called in. Even so, the whole thing is so quietly and gently written, with such a focus on the natural world, that it's a pleasure to read.