octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is very, very well-researched, but it is also dull as paint. When I start thinking about this book, it reminds me more than anything of my grad school experience with science communication. Which seems totally irrelevant for a book about unions and the mob, but bear with me. The main key to getting people to understand science, we were told, was story. And there is a story here - one of labour movements and corruption and organised crime - and I think it's an interesting story, or at least it is in parts. But mostly it's buried under an absolute welter of detail. Flip open to any page and it's acronym soup. Now maybe, when this book was published, it was referring to organisations and people so familiar to the reader that they could easily absorb it, but this is all happening in another time and another country from my perspective, so it can be very hard to follow. In all fairness, things do pick up some in Part Two, which does have marginally more sense of story for me to follow, but mostly it is a hard and often tedious slog.

It does make me want to read a more generalist book on the topic, though. And the total willingness of the upper echelons of the Teamsters union to gouge the rank and file for their own benefit, and to get in bed with the mob, is frankly disturbing. I know the history of labour movements isn't all sunshine and roses, but it seems like half the people in here, given the slightest opportunity, are throwing (literal) sticks of dynamite at each other. And at each other's families, which is worse.

Weird shit lives at the bottom of the ocean. This is not news to anyone except the protagonist, who promptly flips his lid. I mean, it's a story. A pretty basic one, but I like the imagery of the black, fish-stinking land come up out of darkness. All I end up thinking, however, is that said protagonist is a bit of a hysteric and needs a good slap.

It's just not scary at all.

I know there are people that simply love this series, but I've yet to manage anything more than basic liking. It baffles me, mostly. There's a lot of it I do like - and I liked this better than Wrinkle in Time, if only because less of it is this strange semi-religious view of the universe. Basically, as in the previous volume: I like the characters. By which I mean the human characters. The determined mysticism that wafts around all the non-human characters leaves me absolutely cold, though. And when that mysticism touches the human characters, I kind of stop caring about them too. Let me give an example: I felt much, much more for Meg when she went to see Mr. Jenkins to try and stop her little brother being bullied than I did when she was in screaming agony from the creatures that wanted to X her. That... doesn't do much for suspension of disbelief.

I do see what L'Engle is trying to do, and I'm going to keep reading the series regardless, but if a children's fantasy series is going to play with spirituality and the structure of the universe, then the approach that Philip Pullman takes, in his Dark Materials universe for example, is one that really speaks to me. This doesn't. And that's alright, because different approaches appeal to different people... and L'Engle's approach, I can't help it, reminds me of crop circles and crystals and all things woo. Meg's parents can be as super-sciency as can be, but when their daughter is dancing circles within the mitochondria of cells as they sing to the universe, while mentally communicating with an invisible dragon who is really a cherubim, well. This is the type of thing little Fox Mulder ate up with a spoon, I bet.

The idea of someone so disconnected from the world that they slowly disappear from it isn't a new one - I always think of that Buffy episode when I come across a story like this, though I doubt that was the first version of it either. But this is nicely done, particularly the way in which it describes how people will avoid seeking medical help for their problems, first out of fear and denial and then out of shame. On the other hand it's unfortunate that the disappearing protagonist is just so very unlikeable. Perhaps that is a deliberate choice on Langan's part, however, and one which is meant to implicate the reader. I'd avoid this trainwreck of a person too, which would, in this universe, contribute to her loss. Perhaps that should make me feel guilty, even if at some remove... but it doesn't.

"The Lottery" is outstanding, and entirely deserves the reputation that it has. It's so quietly written, and there's such a total lack of hysteria, but that makes it all the more chilling. The terrible thing about it - and every time I read it, it becomes more terrible - is that there's no hesitation. Not from anyone. You can chalk that up to relief, I suppose, that it isn't them, but there's not even a pretense of remorse from anyone. Not even a goodbye kiss from Tessie's husband. The turn is immediate and implacable, and all previous loyalties and likings are gone.

What makes it worse is that I'm certain, I'm absolutely certain, that once everything is over and the immediate clean-up is done, everyone will sincerely mourn her.

This was really interesting! It makes me want to get back into embroidery, not that I was ever very good at it in the first place but still. Embroidery, and I suppose textile art in general, has a history of being seen as "lesser" in comparison to the male-dominated fine arts such as painting or sculpture, but this wasn't always the case. The slow transition of embroidery from a fine art to a craft, from something both genders practiced to something relegated to the feminine, is a story of sad decline. It's not that the skill became less; it's that it became less valued (primarily because of its association with women). It also became, in its way, a reinforcement of the values society wanted to inflict. If training little girls to be silent, obedient adults was the goal, for example, then endless hours of highly structured stick-to-pattern stitchery, especially in the absence of any other education, was a useful tool. (Those poor sad little samplers!)

Parker, though, while describing these changes, also looks at how women used embroidery to subvert the expectations and roles thrust upon them. Many of the banners for women's suffrage, for example, used embroidery in contrast with a number of other artistic techniques to reinforce the point women wanted to make - and even when restricted to pattern, the choice of subjects is a telling one. Parker's example of the changing interpretations of St. Margaret in embroidery, for instance, is excellently drawn, as is the use of symbols that focus on women's experience of fertility and reproduction at a time when midwives were being forced out of childbirth and replaced by male attendants. Very, very interesting.

Absolutely ludicrous. And the same poor quality as the last three books. Everything here is eye-roll-worthy, and it doesn't help that David has thrown everything he can at the wall here, hoping that something will stick. There's bad guys falling into lava, there's a planet hatching into the Great Bird of the Galaxy (and why, oh why anyone involved in this disaster of a series can't take a red pen to in-jokes being shoehorned into plot like this I don't know, they all must have been drunk). There's that loathsome relationship between Shelby and Calhoun, which becomes even more irritating if possible, and of course there's that stupid pon farr storyline which, against all good taste, refuses to die. But the most ludicrous thing here - and that is saying something - is the sword fight in an earthquake. Calhoun gets a sword through the arm, and snaps off the hilt and pulls the blade through his bone as if this is Robin Hood and an arrow instead of presumably decent quality steel. It is just profoundly stupid, on every level.

Dire.

I read and reviewed each volume in this collection separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The rating is an average of the individual ratings - basically, everything got one star bar the first book, House of Cards, which got a very reluctant two stars. I'm still not convinced it deserved it. Look, there's just a host of problems here. There's plot problems, editing problems, I cannot appreciate the smug and smirking tone of it all, but above everything else, the characters are terrible. Characterisation is paper-thin, but the worst of the lot by a country mile is Captain Calhoun, who is a 14 year old boy's wet dream of what a hero should be. I have a particular loathing, however, for how three of the women characters have been presented. The first officer once had a romantic relationship with the captain, and is forever on the edge of blurting out how much she still wants him, while the bulk of her time is spent on, and I quote, "moralistic carping" which is ultimately designed to show how right said captain is, all the time. Another is the product of rape, and weepily traumatised by it. The third is a Vulcan who killed her husband with sex and has intimacy issues because of it, complicated by the fact that she's going though pon farr. None of the men are presented in this desperately needy, emotional way. It irks.

To be honest, I have difficulty understanding how something this poorly written got published in the first place. Given the plethora of fanfic out there that is intelligent, subtle, thoughtful, and just extraordinarily well-written, that the official tie-ins can descend to this level of crap is enormously dispiriting. No wonder I spend my time on Ao3.

Lovecraft is one of those authors who I've never really read. I had a poor experience with one of his short stories back in the day - I have no idea which one, the experience was so interminably tedious I blocked it from my mind - that I never really bothered again. So I'm giving him a go now, despite his appalling character, on the grounds that I want to be well-read in the horror canon and I'm tired of only having a very nebulous idea of what Cthulhu is.

This is the second Lovecraft story I've read in the past week, and you know, at least it was better than "Dagon". I'm still not hugely excited but it was mildly interesting. Mostly I just feel sorry for the author. Yes, racist as he is, and there's a clear and unpleasant undercurrent of that here. But he's clearly just so terrified of everything in life, especially anything that isn't exactly like him, and no wonder his mythology is all about the terrifying unknown, because I rather get the impression that for Lovecraft everything is the terrifying unknown. He doesn't like people who aren't like him, and he doesn't like science much, according to this book, because it engages with the unknown, and he'd really rather just stay in bed and pull a pillow over his head, except he might dream and that terrifies him too. It's all just rather pathetic.

I have to laugh, though, at the narrator's insistence that he will never hint to others of what he has discovered before writing the whole lot down so that others can discover it. Also at the description of Dunedin, NZ, which is where I went to uni, and how degenerate it is. Castle Street and the the Captain Cook on a Saturday night springs to mind, lol. And I do like squid. But that's about it, really.

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. Epic fantasy can be a hard sell for me, but that's leavened here by the fact that the characters are constantly moving between this world and a secondary one, and that gives the story a grounding that I can appreciate. Plus, you know, it's all about books and there's never been a book about books that I didn't like. Particularly relevant here is the ongoing argument of the usefulness of libraries, and of their role in preserving data. (I was particularly struck by the lines comparing the frequency with with libraries are expected to cull stock compared with all the far-more-useless-than-books-things stacked up in warehouses for eternity. As a culture, our priorities are fucked.)

Honestly, I was a bit surprised at how much I enjoyed this. That's nothing again Knox! But The Absolute Book, also features fairies and angels and godhead, and these are also often not my favourite parts of fantasy. If I'm perfectly honest, I do think at times the book gets a little cluttered and the epilogue hasn't been set up sufficiently, but I really did enjoy the real-world parts of this book, and the secondary setting was beautifully described. It's a fascinatingly ambitious text, anyway, and it's absolutely stuffed with little historical details about destroyed libraries that make me want to go look up some of the sources Knox lists in her acknowledgements section.