octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

An extremely readable account of opposites: the architectural designs behind the Chicago World Fair, contrasted with the life of a serial killer, H.H. Holmes, who was operating in the city at the time of the Fair. The link between the two is fairly slim, relying pretty much only on place, but in fairness Larson is concerned more with narrative contrast than deeper connections and it's a tactic that works extremely well. I do think the Fair sections got more attention (and were better researched) than the Holmes sections, but part of that is an unavoidable result of differing levels of evidence - there's so much more for one than the other - and Larson is up front about this, so it grates less than it otherwise would have. But it's really very interesting, and very well-written.

Earlier today I reread the guidebook to the King Ludwig Way walk I did some years back. The walk ends at the castle, which I visited at the same time - going there was pretty much the reason I did the walk to begin with! I picked up this little book as a souvenir, so I thought I may as well reread it and log it here at the same time as the other. It's an enjoyable brief overview of the castle's history and rooms, but as beautiful as some of the photographs are, they just don't hold a candle to seeing all that magnificent artwork up close and in person.

I read and reviewed the two short memoirs collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The rating is an average of what I gave the individual pieces. A World Away, by Mervyn Peake's wife Maeve Gilmore, is a stunning piece of writing about their life together. I gave it 5 stars, as it was genuinely outstanding. The memoir by their son Sebastian, however, A Child of Bliss, only earned 3 stars from me. While it has interesting parts, it suffers from lack of focus and is simply not as well-written as his mother's. There's also a lack of consistency between the two accounts, which is interesting in itself. People remember things differently, after all, and gathering together different perspectives does give a broader picture. I'm curious as to the train story, though - when Mervyn Peake was a child his family travelled on the Trans-Siberian railway. Maeve remembers Peake telling the story as if his brother was nearly left behind at a station; Sebastian remembers Peake telling the story as if it were Peake himself who was nearly left. There's a similar confusion when it came to a letter that teased Peake for giving children nightmares (and their parents' therapy bills!) with his illustrations. Maeve recalls the letter as being from Walter de la Mare, Sebastian recalls it being from C.S. Lewis. I don't point these out as shortcomings in the collection, by the way, because they're not - more as points of interest in how memories differ.

I should note that there are some strange formatting choices in this book. A Child of Bliss seems to be in a different font. It's certainly in a different sized font, and the indent for each paragraph is surprisingly and offputtingly large - the first line of each starts about a third of the way across the page. I'm afraid I don't see the point of this; it makes the whole book look patched together.

Beautifully written memoir of Maeve Gilmore's time with her husband Mervyn Peake, before his early death from Parkinson's disease. Peake is one of my absolute favourite writers, but his wife - an accomplished artist in her own right - is certainly no slouch with words either. And this memoir, which seems constructed more as a series of loose memories strung together (often with months or years between them) than a typical narrative, is deeply affecting. It gives the picture of a somewhat nomadic family - money was never very plentiful, as might be expected with two artists trying to scrape a living together with three kids in tow - but the moves between Sark and London, between suburbia and army camps, seem in a way less present than the image of home as a place filled with paintings and paper, endless drafts and sketches everywhere.

Most affecting, I think, is the telling of the failure of Peake's play The Wit To Woo, which was, after a period of many years, first staged while he was in the early period of his disease. Gilmore presents the play as a symbol of hope, almost, that Peake was clinging to at the time, and its disastrous outcome both mirrors and shadows his descent into premature senility. It's just so awful to read, knowing as I did the outcome in advance... and, to be honest, having read the play recently I can't bring myself to blame the critics. It's just not very good, but that a mind and talent like Peake's was doomed to end in disappointment and incapacity is like a small and terrible tragedy in itself - and this memoir, short and perfectly shaped as it is, relays this all too clearly.

Have to say, I finished this book and immediately decided to read through the books in the bibliography. Not right this minute, but they've been added to the ever-expanding list of things I must read eventually. (It's a very long list.) I'm particularly interested in reading more about Ida B. Wells, and the biography of Countess Bathory that argues against her famous bloodthirsty nature. Because there's something suspiciously excessive about those particular legends...

That's one of the themes that runs through this book: propaganda and public relations. It's not news to anyone that people who go against the power structures of the day tend to be demonised by those structures, and that often, their opinion of the renegade is the one stamped into history. So a lot of the rejected princesses in this book have clearly been slated beyond their desert, which is not to say that some of them haven't done particularly horrible things themselves, but then this book doesn't go very in-depth to any of them so there's not a great deal of rounded exploration of their characters. Which, fair enough, it's not here to do that - those studies are saved for the further reading section. Instead, this book's a sampler of those women who tend to have been shoved aside in history, complete with full-page, wide-eyed Disney representations of each. The artwork, I have to say, is very impressive, and many entries have explanations for all the details in the portraits, which I found really interesting. And it's written in a chatty, accessible style, which made the whole thing genuinely enjoyable to read. Fun and informative!

Peter Sís is one of my favourite picture book writer/artists, and if this doesn't draw the level of love from me that his Starry Messenger does, it's still both absorbing and fascinating. It's a graphic memoir of his childhood in Prague, behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Of course, as a child a lot of what is happening simply goes over Sís' head (and he finds out later that his parents are actively keeping the worst of it from him, such as an uncle killed by prison guards). Part of that ignorance, though, comes from the indoctrination that he and the other children are receiving in schools. Yet as he ages, doubts and questions creep in, alongside various art forms from the outside world.

It's the art that provides the narrative thread here. Sís is an artist first, and his intricate drawings have always been what's most attracted me to his work. Young Sís, clutching his paper and pencils, is everywhere present - there's even a panel of him hiding under a classroom desk during an atomic bomb drill, still frantically drawing. Often, his drawings are the only pieces of colour running through the panels. Copies of his real life drawings are used as background for extracts from his childhood journals, and you can see the awareness growing in him of what censorship and dictatorship and fascism are doing both to his community and to his art. It's disturbing and hopeful both, and the whole thing is just fantastic.

What an enormous grab bag of a book! It takes bits and pieces of Peake's work, from a number of different sources (both published and unpublished), and I suppose it results in a sort of teaser-representation of the author... but then again I'm not sure that's quite accurate. In saying so, however, I'm aware that, for me, Peake's appeal resides firmly in his Gormenghast novels, which I adore. There's nothing of them here, bar a reprint of the related novella Boy in Darkness, which is outstanding. There's far more of the poet and playwright, which is why this is knocked down a star. I love his novels, I do really enjoy his poetry... but there's no denying that his plays don't have the same appeal. The Wit To Woo was apparently an enormous flop back in the day, and if I were reviewing it on its own I'd be hard-pressed to give it more than two stars - the thing really is a tedious slog, with the odd bit of fantastic language. The Noah's Ark play for kids isn't particularly outstanding either, but there's an improvement with the radio play version of Mr. Pye. What makes this collection worth reading, however, is the sheer impression of range that it leaves - Peake was really enormously talented in a number of fields - and as always his artwork is a sheer delight.

Four different paranormal romance novellas, from four different authors, and they are all Christmas-themed. The rating is an average of what I would have given each novella, and it's an easy average too - as far as I'm concerned, they're all two star reads. I mean, they're okay. They're not awful, but none of them really caught my interest. It didn't help that in two of them ("Melting Frosty" by Maggie Shayne, and "Beat of Temptation" by Nalini Singh) both the love interests were deeply patronising towards the female protagonists, something which is never appealing in my book, and I don't care that in both cases Tragic Backstory made them do it. Seriously, if you take a shot every time Shayne's Matthew refers to Holly as some version of "little thing" you'll be plastered by the end. On egg nog, probably.

I'm part of a small writers' group where we critique each other's work, and a while back one of the other members of the group was telling the rest of us about the Ninth Roman Legion, which apparently wandered off into the wilds of Scotland, some thousands strong, and entirely disappeared. No-one ever found out what happened to them, and I was quite interested. I mean, what a great story! So when I came across this in the library it pricked my memory and I thought, well, why not.

I liked it. Very well written, and I think Sutcliff came to a sensible conclusion about what might have happened - basically, that there was a breakdown in discipline, infighting, and mass desertion plus, you know, battle with the local Scots, who were none too thrilled with yet another wave of invaders. Can't honestly say that I blame them. Which makes it difficult for me to feel really in sympathy with the protagonist, Marcus. His dad was one of the officers who disappeared with the Ninth, so when Marcus, also a soldier, is posted to Britain he can't resist following up. He desperately wants to retrieve the eagle that was symbolic of the Ninth, and thus reform the legion, presumably to keep the rest of the countryside down again, and I don't have a lot of time for his goals, I have to say. He is genuinely quite sympathetic to the Britons that he meets, but there's not a lot of sense in freeing the slave who becomes his best friend, while still being happy to keep supporting the invasion that, you know, captured and enslaved the poor bastard in the first place.

I'm watching Doctor Who from the beginning, reading the novelisations as I go, and to be honest they're just not very good. Which is a particular shame for this story, as I found the episodes of "The Keys of Marinus" to be really enjoyable (certainly more so than the horribly tedious "Marco Polo", which preceded it). But as with the other novelisations, this is very short and very thin. Like the others, it does get points for pacing - there's no room for the slightest waffle - but I struggle to see the point of going to all the effort of novelisation if it's just going to be a flat copy. Admittedly, there do exist some very minor changes here, however, and one of them is deeply annoying. There's just no reason to add a scene of Ian slapping Barbara across the face, as he certainly doesn't in the episode (and never would). If Hinchcliffe was going to change anything about the original, he would have done far better to paper over that plot hole of Ian, Barbara, and Altos leaving their transporter devices behind in the snow hut when they went looking for the third key. Ridiculously stupid.