octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is one of my branching-out books, one of those periodic attempts to read something other than fantasy and science fiction. And I had my doubts, considering I generally find business writing to be dull as ditch water, but such is not the case here. It's a shame he's long dead, and thus unable to address current events, because Allen is an excellent writer - clear, approachable, often dryly funny, and he is clearly writing for a general audience so he explains everything as he goes in the most lucid way. If more authors wrote about business like this I might be inclined to read more of it.

Anyway, this book was published in 1935, and it covers the financial history of the economic powerhouses of America, from the 1890s up until about the time of publishing. It is both surprisingly interesting and surprisingly familiar. As Gretchen Morgenson states in her Introduction, a lot of the greed, rapacity, flexible ethics, and incestuous economics that is often observed today is here as well... in fact the implication is very strong that because the early problems weren't sufficiently well dealt with, the ability of the very rich to exploit everyone else through unethical - if not actually illegal - business practices goes largely unchecked and keeps on repeating itself. Given the time that Allen is writing in, the stock market crash of 1929 looms large as a potential outcome of such determinedly piggish troughing, as economic houses of cards collapsed under the weight of their own overreach and fictional leverage. It's an honestly entertaining read, but still a bit depressing to see how little has largely changed.

I read this for task #12 of Book Riot's Read Harder challenge 2020: a religious memoir. Technically it's a religious memoir from a religion other than yours (mine), but as I'm an atheist that's pretty much all of them, so I plumped for the first suitable book I found in the library... it really was a lucky dip. And an extremely interesting one! What I know of Mormonism is vanishingly little, and Laake's experience seems to indicate that's no great loss. Her memoir focuses on her time as a young wife, trying to conform to a religion that makes her increasingly unhappy, and the continuing tension between expectation and experience ultimately drives her to a mental breakdown. Yet the book is primarily a positive one* that shows Laake learning and growing and, in the end, welcoming the outside world, and there is an undercurrent of wry humour here that is both funny and very very sad. When the young Mormon couple visit a gynaecologist, for example, because Laake is having orgasms and they are both completely flummoxed about what is happening to her and what might be wrong... it's not funny at all and yet it is.

*Markedly less funny is that, after I read the book, I went to look up the author and found that she eventually died from suicide. Not gonna lie, that really undercuts the positive ending. It's still an extremely well-written and likeable memoir about the stranglehold religion can place on a life, however, so I'd say go ahead and read it anyway, and remember Laake for her successes and bravery instead.

This is a little predictable in places - I picked who the main villain was very quickly, as well as the identity of the protagonist - but it was still an enjoyable read. Then again, I do like haunted house stories so I'm predisposed to the sort of gothic, overblown melodrama that's going on here. What's particularly interesting about the book is that the sense of personality comes less from the house itself than the ghosts that inhabit it. For all the characters talk about how Bliss House feels alive, there's never that sense of looming malice that you get from, for example, Hill House or the Overlook Hotel. However, that's not particularly disappointing because it gives a schizophrenic sort of tinge to what's going on - the house is inhabited, is impregnated with evil, sure, but it's not haunted only by evil. Ariel, the 14 year old girl who moves with her mother into Bliss House, for instance, is both harmed and helped by what exists inside it. That's a very different sort of unbalance within a haunted house setting, and it was something that worked really well here I thought.

One star is too generous. This is genuinely dreadful, on a level that I don't expect from Star Trek. I know that every franchise has their stinkers, but this book is so contrary to the humanism and principles of the series that I can't believe it ever got published. I'm not talking about the low-level annoyances here: the sexism, the piss-poor editing (in one place, it's stated it'll take the ship 100+ years at Warp 2 to get back to Federation space, a few pages later it's suddenly "several years" away at the same rate). I'm not even talking about the asininely stupid world-building, in which a civilisation capable of developing transporter technology on a par with that of the Federation has no concept of time and has only managed weapons technology sufficient for a gun which would be antique even by our standards. No, I'm talking about how Kirk and crew (because none of them ever object) bulldoze the Prime Directive into the ground with not one iota of self-awareness, rather an abundance of hypocrisy, violence, and absolute obnoxiousness. Kirk destroys the culture of a planet (and very nearly the entire planet itself) purely for his own benefit, and doesn't even have the decency to be honest about it. It's your choice, we won't use force! he says, having kidnapped, phasered, and otherwise browbeaten and threatened the people of this world to get his own way. He's an absolute disgrace, not within ten million light years of the Kirk I know, and I can only hope in some horrible mirror universe, which this can only be, the real Kirk appears and kicks his disgusting arse.

I sincerely hope this was the only Star Trek book this author ever wrote.

I read this as part of Book Riot's Read Harder 2020 challenge - it was task #14, a romance starring a single parent. I don't read a huge amount of romances, so basically just picked the first one I could find that fit the task, and honestly I was mildly disappointed... albeit in a very unfair way. The Goodreads record I first saw of this book - I was trawling book lists here, trying to find something suitable that I could get from the library - had a truly terrible cover and an awful, hyperbolic description. The book sounded monumentally bad, and I was enthralled. Basically it had one of those Gothic romance covers, with a woman in flowing dress fleeing a castle, and the blurb made it sound like this governess, off to a Cornish mansion to fall in love with the parent of her charge, was headed to this place of haunted melodrama. I was expecting purple prose and high drama, I tell you, and what I got was a sensible heroine who barely did any running and shrieking. Granted, the climax, resolution, and epilogue all occur in about the last ten pages so it finishes very quickly, but it was still an enjoyable read... if quite old-fashioned in places. I think it's safe to say the book's been very heavily influenced by both Jane Eyre and Rebecca, and if it's not as literate or well-written as either of those, it is certainly more informal and goodnatured.

Well this is certainly an improvement on the first two volumes, even if I don't love it. It is, however, unreservedly likeable, and I think I get on with this volume in the series better than the previous two because there's less of that blasted mysticism getting in the way of story. Also, the structure of this is more interesting. Given that the narrative hangs on Charles Wallace sliding into other people and living their lives with little memory of his own, it almost comes across as interconnected short stories strung together, and given that I'm a fan of short stories I liked that structure very much. I do wish, however, that the featured generations of that family would have given themselves different names. There really is no need for an ceaseless procession of Zillas, even if the spelling varies slightly from one to the next. I grant you that this is a children's book, but it still needlessly telegraphs the connections well in advance.

Okay, I'm new to Hawkeye - certainly this version, and I only know the other one from the Marvel movies, so I didn't really know what to expect from this. I basically just picked it up from the library on a whim. And I liked it. I liked the main character, who seems fun, though I wonder if the constant wisecracking might get irritating eventually. I thought the focus on cyber-crimes and sexual harassment was an appealing one, and I can see the beginning of what I presume to be sidekicks popping up here. All in all, it was a really accessible introduction, and I particularly liked the bright cover.

I do wonder, though, why someone with a supposed background in superheroics is left to wander pretty much penniless as she starts her business in what looks like the most dumpy office ever. Here, I suppose, I'm hampered by not knowing the back story, but she must be pretty far down the superhero scale if no-one knows who she is and there's no access to any sort of resources.

I'm reading this right after issue #1, and the story is getting much more interesting to me. If someone had summarised it as "not the stalker's fault, really," I would have rolled my eyes a bit - exactly as Kate does - but it becomes clear, as the comic goes on, that something much more sinister is happening. Dodgy people are doing dodgy things, yes, but there's a level of outside force, a sort of mind control, that's altering people's behaviour, and for the worse. I thought it was quite creepy, actually - and effectively underlined by the apparent inability of the police department to do anything useful about the situation. Stalking's always been difficult to address, or so I've heard, because so much of it skates the line between legal and not (even if the moral issue is quite clear). Anyway, I am invested now.

Onto issue #3 now, and I'm finding Kate Bishop genuinely enjoyable. She's still wisecracking a lot, which is not generally my favourite character trait, but it seems, from this issue anyway, that her humour is often a way of navigating the fact that a lot of the time she's fumbling around without a clue. She's clearly more amateur than professional in some of her decisions here - checking behind all of the doors is the most entertaining example, as she mistakenly bursts in on people having sex, or on the loo, and is utterly mortified - and I'm good with that. It makes her seem more approachable, especially as I'm new to the character. If she's still so new at this, then I feel as if I haven't missed that much in her evolution... which may be totally wrong, but it does increase the impression of accessibility that this series is giving me.

Okay, #4 is where this series starts to lose me. Not enough to drop down to 2 stars - this is still a basically likeable read - but there are elements in it I don't much care for. For one, the antagonist goes from genuinely creepy to honestly kind of stupid. I pretty much lost all interest in him before his sticky end arrived, and the way Kate reduced him in size was just a little bit twee. Secondly, before said sticky end, there was a part where that antagonist, during a police interview, said something to Kate that clearly played into her back story (of which, again, I know nothing).

Part of what stops me from getting into a lot of superhero comics is I always feel there's this giant wedge of back story I'm somehow expected to assimilate. That puts me off a bit, and I was honestly happy going along here, knowing nothing else about Kate Bishop but clearly such is not going to continue. I can't blame Thompson for that - she's obviously working in a wider universe - so the mild disappointment is mine to manage, but still. And to top it all off, that back story would involve Daddy issues, which is possibly the most common and least interesting back story trope ever devised. Honestly, there should be a moratorium.