octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

It has to be said that I know even less about Jessica Jones than I do about Kate Bishop, so I'm sure there's a lot that's passing me by here. I did enjoy seeing a mentor relationship between two women, though, which my admittedly superficial experience of superhero narratives has not really come across before.

I did not enjoy Brad. (Does anyone? I take it he's meant to be obnoxious.) Apparently there's back story there but if it involves him, and the already tedious lost Dad storyline, I do not care. On the plus side, however, there is a dragon. But if that dragon doesn't turn out to be who/what I think it is, I'll eat my hat. Given that I'm reading these comics from the first collected edition, of the first six issues, my suspicion is that this is the first of a two-comic story, so the ending seems like it's going to be obvious enough to wrap up quickly. Bonus points if Brad gets eaten.

Brad does not get eaten, boo. We should be so lucky. And in a desperately unsurprising turn of events, the dragon is, well... let's just say I picked the twist there back in the previous issue. It's not a particularly original twist. I feel like I've seen it a dozen times before, and I'm not that interested. What makes up for the lack of originality, however, is the ongoing relationship between Kate and her mentor Jessica. I'd like to see more of that - it seems such a positive representation of friendship, and I'd far rather read that than endless bits of angst from people who can't get on with each other, for example.

I read and reviewed each of the six comics collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The collection rating is an average of the individual ratings, and a simple average at that. All the issues got three stars from me - it's a fun, likeable series, and I really like the main character. I also like the group of sidekicks she's gathered around her, although with only six issues their characters haven't been explored in any real depth yet. Still, they seem nice, and she has a dog. I'm absolutely predisposed to like a superhero with a dog!

I do feel, however, that I'm missing a lot of background here. I knew nothing about Kate Bishop before picking this up, and the second half of the book in particular alludes to a back story that frankly, I'm not too interested in. Don't get me wrong: I am interested in reading more of this series, as I really do like Kate. I just don't care that much at this point about her past or her lost family.

This was outstanding. Really, really interesting. Woods, who was primarily interested in chimpanzees, goes to a bonobo sanctuary in the Congo with her fiance, and for several years they study the apes there. The basic idea is that bonobos are intensely peaceful, cooperative, and tolerant animals... which makes them very unlike chimps, and very unlike humans - and if there's a place in the world where human violence and cruelty is on full display, the Congo is it. (Fair warning: the book is scattered with truly hideous stories from the war there.) Woods' partner Brian wants to isolate what makes bonobos different from the other apes, as part of an effort to understand in turn the nature of (closely-related) humanity. The experiments the two of them carry out - for example trying to see if bonobos will cooperate with each other to solve puzzles for green apples, their favourite food - are interesting and well described, clearly illustrating the personalities and behaviour of the animals.

It's an often sad and often horrifying book, but there's a fundamental hopefulness there, both for the conservation efforts keeping the endangered bonobo alive, and for the positive influence they might have on a species that sorely needs it.

I thought this was lovely - and the illustrations are beautiful. Little Yoon, an immigrant to the United States, is having trouble at school due to language issues. She doesn't like the way her name looks in English, and would rather be a cat or a bird or a cupcake. It's warm and encouraging and I came across it on the New York Public Library's list of 100 Great Children's Books - one of the better ones on that list that I've read!

If I'm perfectly honest, the tv episodes of "The Sensorites" did very little for me. There were some nice moments, but it was very slow. Robinson's novelisation actually improved on the story in this regard. The pace picked up, and everything zipped along so that I ended up, for once, thinking more of the book than the actual programme. Unfortunately, the book failed to address the same giant plot problem of the episodes - namely, where was that deadly nightshade coming from?! It's an Earth plant, so it shouldn't be growing on an alien world. Perhaps the astronauts brought it with them... enough to poison an entire city (why would anyone need so much, and why would they bring it in the first place?). Possibly they only had a small sample and grew more (in dark underground tunnels where there's no sunshine for photosynthesis, and in alien soils which lack the microbiota of Earth?). I don't think so.

I'm a botanist by training, alright. These things matter to me.

Interesting if sometimes over-thorough explanation of one possible future of fascism. Instead of the jackbooted versions of WW2, for example, Gross argues that future iterations of fascism will be more palatable, more friendly in their presentation, and that they will come about due to an unholy alliance between Big Business and Big Politics. Well, we can see today how often business seems to pay off government in order to get their own way, and how some businesses have grown to have an economic power greater than some countries, so this isn't off-base on Gross' part.

However this book does, I think, suffer somewhat though from being a product of its time. It was written, I believe, in the late 1970s, and is is extremely America-focused. Which is not in itself a flaw, but what Gross hasn't foreseen, for example, is the growth in technology and how this affects his thesis. There are sections of the book dealing with technology, and how it can (and will) be used in surveillance, and in this as with the often corrosive influence of Big Business Media (thank you Mr. Murdoch, you climate-denying anti-science hack) Gross is certainly prophetic. Nonetheless, a lot of the media consumed nowadays, especially by the younger sections of the population, is social. This has an effect on news coverage. When a current event catches my attention, for example, I get a lot of information on that event from the internet, which frequently has real-time responses and videos from those living through the event. There's a growing trend in the democratisation of media, is what I'm saying, that will eventually, I trust, counter the Murdochs of the world. Now Gross can't have been expected to predict this sort of thing, but it does affect his argument... even though a lot of that argument remains valid and concerning.

Yeah, this isn't great. To be fair, I didn't think the film was that good either, so it would have been expecting a lot for the book to be an improvement on the source material. I just couldn't take it seriously, and characterisation in both media was paper thin. It also doesn't help that I have very little time for Lovecraftian giant monsters in general, and it's a rare author who can get me to care. (Lachlan Walter did it in We Call It Monster if you want a more intelligent look at the subject.) I end this particular story wondering why they just didn't drop a nuke down the hole, but if there's an in-universe reason why not no-one ever bothered to give it.

The book does get an extra star for the creepy description of the different types of elevator monsters, and for the lovely little Japanese schoolgirls who buggered up their sacrifice by being gentle and loving to their creepy ghost. I honestly think I'd rather have read a book about that...

Fun, beautifully illustrated little story about a wonderfully named child, Elmer Elevator, who runs away from home to rescue a baby dragon. Gannett has a fine sense of the ridiculous, populating her story with a number of talking animals who are deeply unrealistic while still being entertaining... the crocodiles who like to suck on lollipops are I think my particular favourite. I mean it's a bit silly but it's fun, and Elmer is both kind and resourceful. I do think that the ending was quite abrupt, however, although apparently this is a series so it may simply function as a cliff-hanger?

This is one of those novels that is a very thin disguise of real life. It's inspired by the author's own imprisonment, and one gets the sense that every detail here is something he experienced himself. I'm left to wonder, then, why he didn't write a memoir instead of a novel? (The otherwise useful introduction was no help on that point.) Anyway, it's a pretty grim read, enlivened - if that is the word - by a fundamental sense of humanism that still manages to find sparks of genuine admiration for most of its subjects, all of whom are either prisoners of jailers in Siberian exile. The constant grind of deprivation and dehumanisation experienced by said prisoners (and even by the jailers - as the protagonist points out, the practice of beating another person does as little for the character of the beater as it does for the beaten) is just one long, slow misery. Particularly depressing was the story of the consumptive prisoner, who - even on his deathbed - could not have his fetters removed. Even in his last unconsciousness there was an apparent need to maintain the symbolism of imprisonment, which seems to me to be an example of lacking compassion to the very last.

As a quasi-historical document, it has a lot of power. I wonder, though, if the strange sense of objectivity, of almost disinterested observation, is an artifact of the decision to make this ostensibly fiction rather than memoir. The protagonist does talk a lot of his own isolation and misery, but there's still that veneer of distance that makes this less emotionally compelling, perhaps, than it might be.