octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Not my usual reading fare, but I am trying to branch out. Three stars may seem like a lacklustre rating, but in truth it's no reflection on the quality of the journalistic research here, which is absolutely excellent. The three authors appear to have done substantially more than a lot of the government and regulatory agencies trying to investigate these crimes. However, as those authors point out, white collar crime is frequently pushed aside in favour of more "obvious" criminality - given the havoc these people cause, though, with their pathological greed, that is deeply unfortunate. And, frankly, counterproductive.

So, no issue with the research, or with the conclusions. It's just with the best will in the world I can't get that interested in business. It's a steep learning curve, a book like this, and one that's not helped by the overdose of acronym on every page. Depressingly, it seems to repeat, too, in great detail, a number of extremely similar stories. Greedy Bastard from (insert state here) bilks everyone around him, having essentially bought off enough politicians and other sorts to clear his way, and ultimately slinks back into the crony network of Greedy Bastards because they all support each other. I mean the weight of evidence is impressive, but it's just so bloody depressing. Not gonna lie, it's also pretty stodgy and took me literally months to read; I had to do it a little at a time. One of those books that is highly admirable, but I can't say that I come away with a genuine liking for it. Like vaccination, really - absolutely worthwhile, but the needle is still no fun.

A bit basic, but still more entertaining than the actual episodes (if only because it's over faster). Admittedly, those episodes have been lost so I have only seen the recreation, which consists of photographs and the audio recording of the script, but even so it went on forever. Not so the novelisation, which is over in 140 pages or so - about 20 pages an episode. And honestly, I struggle to see the point of novelisations that don't add anything to the original story. Oh, there are minor differences here, and Ping Cho gets a love interest who is not her ancient husband to-be, but mostly it's a paper-thin copy of a not-very-interesting run of television.

I came across this time-travelling Australian fantasy in the library recently, and just had to pick it up. It's been decades since I last read it, but it was one of those books I absolutely loved as a kid - I was almost worried about reading it again, wondering if the magic would be lost, but it wasn't. It was as entertaining as ever, and I was thoroughly amused by all those rotten kids. Which sounds terrible, but it's true: nearly all the kids in this book are monsters of selfishness. Selfish brats of children can be fantastic characters - my favourite book of all time, The Secret Garden, has as its heroine an enormously unpleasant little girl, and I am deeply attached to her. Both Beatie Bow and Abigail are not all that much better, and little Gilbert is the most obnoxious pest - when Abby finally loses her shit and clouts him about the ears you know it is entirely well-deserved. It's not that I find unpleasant children particularly likeable, you understand. They're not very. But they do feel realistic, and the kids in Playing Beatie Bow always feel absolutely real to me. I'm going to have to find a copy of this book for myself - I don't want to stumble randomly across it in another twenty years and realise I've forgotten all about it again. It's too entertaining for that...

I read and reviewed each of the three volumes contained here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The rating is an average of the individual ratings - both Northern Lights and The Amber Spyglass earned five stars from me, while The Subtle Knife earned four. It's true, I think, that the middle volume is a little disconnected from the others - while the first focused entirely on Lyra, the second introduced another protagonist, and although I like Will, he does take over in some ways, and balance isn't really restored until book three.

The real strength of this series starts in the characters, but by the end (and I've read this series more than once, and get the same impression each time) it's the themes that have begun to predominate. It's an interesting transition, a constant zooming out in scale: a series that starts with a strong focus on a single character expands, by the end, to the structure and purpose of the universe. I think it's a successful shift myself - by the end I'm more focused on the themes, as I think I'm supposed to be - and it's supported throughout by a very strong sense of imagery. The whole thing is just wonderful.

I remember reading somewhere, in an interview I think, that Pullman was heavily influenced by Narnia - influenced in a not-what-to-do way, I mean. There's a subtle indicator of this in Northern Lights, where Lyra first becomes aware of another world while hiding in a wardrobe. It's The Amber Spyglass, however, that really makes clear what a failure The Last Battle was - the final Narnia book remains the only book I have ever thrown across a room in disgust, and my childhood hatred for that mean-spirited piece of shit has never abated.

Of course I am influenced here by my own atheism, but the themes and focus of Spyglass - and by extension the rest of the trilogy - are abundantly clear, and they're written here with such fundamental kindness and wonder and strength that the ending is as hopeful as it is sad, for all it is an absolute ending of things we would like to see continue, I'm sure. It's just all done so well, and so thoughtfully, that it remains one of my favourites, even after a number of rereads.

I read and reviewed each of the volumes collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The rating for the collection is the average of the ratings given to each individual book: both Philosopher's Stone and Prisoner of Azkaban got five stars from me. The former is just a really fun introduction to the series, and the latter is the best of the lot, bar none. It's complex and entertaining and does it all without the bloat that dropped like a text-filled hippo on every succeeding volume. For those of you who would never have bothered with arithmancy (shame on you, whoever you are), that means Chamber of Secrets got three stars. I mean I like it, but it never caught my attention the way the other two did - primarily, I think, because Hermione's out of action for a lot of it and I just don't care about Harry or Ron a tenth as much as I do her.

Eh. It's a very short, 800 word prequel story, and it's alright. It's mostly about James Potter and Sirius Black, and honestly I've never had much time for either of them. They tend to come across as dicks in the Harry Potter books, and to me that's what they're like here. I suspect I'm supposed to see them as cool and rebellious, but no. They're dicks.

You know, with the best will in the world I just don't love this as much as Northern Lights. And that always surprises me, because this follow-up volume starts really digging into the series' anti-theism theme and that should frankly be my bread and butter, but still. Don't get me wrong: I am sympathetic and interested and it's genuinely a very good book, but there's a little less magic about it, and I'm not entirely sold on the world-jumping. I really enjoyed the worldbuilding of the first novel, so to ditch that fascinating setting for the boring old normal no-daemon world, or the sterile city of ghosts and children who are far less appealing than Lyra, is slightly disappointing. Even Will, who is himself likeable in a fairly bleak sort of way, doesn't match up to her, and given that Lyra is I think the strongest character in the series, it's a shame to so split the focus.

On the very bright side, Mrs. Coulter - who isn't around for much more than a cameo appearance or two - makes the very best of her brief role, continuing to be an utterly horrifying villain (and her little monkey too). But the stand-out scene here is Lee and Hester. I won't say much more than that, because I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't read it, but soft-hearted for all animals as I am it's still amazing how much enormously more affecting those daemons make their humans...

I'm rereading this series after a break of some years and I love it just as much now as I did then. It's so much better than that crappy film adaptation; I don't know what they were thinking, gutting the themes of the books as they did. The focus on free will is absolutely fundamental to the text, and frankly you'd have to be as thick as pig shit not to recognise that.

But anyway (she says, trying to avoid ranting on irrelevancies), Northern Lights is clever and thoughtful and stuffed with wonderful characters. Those characters really are excellent. The antagonists are convincingly evil and yet are more than cut outs, while the protagonists and supporting cast are just as believable. I've a giant soft spot for Iorek the armoured bear, but really the stand out character here is Lyra. She's a good kid but not a nice one; I love that she's rough around the edges and her first instinct is always to lie and be distrustful. She's always reminded me a bit of Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden, another intermittently horrible little girl. I enjoy characters who are a bit horrible sometimes - especially when they're kids - because it does make them seem a bit more real that way. Lyra feels unmistakeably real to me, and always has done. Because of that, her relationship with her daemon is likewise extremely convincing, and the part of the story where they were being forcibly separated never fails to raise a genuine shudder of revulsion.

I read and reviewed the illustrated edition separately (apparently illustrated editions aren't folded in with non-illustrated) so this is basically just for my own records. Cutting and pasting the relevant bits from the other review:

I don't want to say that this is derivative, entirely, although the influence of Dracula is both immense and immediately apparent. Granted, I struggle to think of a vampire novel in which this is not the case, but I still really enjoyed it. King is always compulsively readable, and the book is extremely creepy. The vampires scratching at second floor windows will never fail to make me shudder, and I freely admit that this was the point, in the middle of the night, when I stopped reading and decided to wait for daylight before I picked the book back up again.

Where King succeeds particularly well here, I think, is in his depiction of a small town that becomes ever more isolated, and in showing just how easy it is for that isolation to go unremarked. Monster stories in general are so dependent on geography, on hunting grounds and places of easy camouflage, and I liked how both the physical and moral settings of the book underpinned this. 'Salem's Lot may be a small and isolated community, but it's also one where everyday human evil is ever-present - domestic violence, child abuse, gossip and ignorance. It's so easy for true corruption to sneak in because corruption is already embedded there, albeit in miniature.

I do find it slightly unfortunate that the main character, Ben Mears, is so overshadowed by the supporting cast. Both Mark and Father Callahan seem much stronger characters to me. Mark, in particular, seems an early rendition of Bill Denbrough, and I'm far more interested in seeing what happened offscreen to Callahan than I am in anything that actually happened to Ben throughout the book.