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octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)
This book is basically a transcribed series of lectures given by Campbell over a period of several years. They're quite interesting, focusing as they do on how myths can be re-interpreted for the modern world, but because they're general lectures there is sometimes a bit of repetition and over-explanation here - Campbell, for me, is one of those writers who must explain everything, which can border on irritating levels of wordiness in every book of his I've read so far. This is especially apparent in the central third of this book, which can sometimes be a bit of a slog.
His thesis is generally well-supported, but because it is so anti-religion (as indeed am I) I may be looking at it with a somewhat reduced level of scepticism, lol. But the schism he describes between European/Middle Eastern and Indian/Chinese/Japanese mythology, in that the former tends more to individualism and the latter to community values, thus making the former more appropriate for an increasingly individualised world, is making me scrunch up my nose a bit. I mean yes, the growing prioritisation of the individual is a clear and present trend, no argument there. But also, the more we learn about science and ecology the more our role as ecological organism - and thus the essential interconnection of our existence - becomes clear also, and there's not a lot of time spent on that. There is also absolutely no time spent on the mythologies of Africa (bar that of ancient Egypt) which seems a glaring omission.
His thesis is generally well-supported, but because it is so anti-religion (as indeed am I) I may be looking at it with a somewhat reduced level of scepticism, lol. But the schism he describes between European/Middle Eastern and Indian/Chinese/Japanese mythology, in that the former tends more to individualism and the latter to community values, thus making the former more appropriate for an increasingly individualised world, is making me scrunch up my nose a bit. I mean yes, the growing prioritisation of the individual is a clear and present trend, no argument there. But also, the more we learn about science and ecology the more our role as ecological organism - and thus the essential interconnection of our existence - becomes clear also, and there's not a lot of time spent on that. There is also absolutely no time spent on the mythologies of Africa (bar that of ancient Egypt) which seems a glaring omission.
The prose in this is just outstanding; there's something so effortless about it. I don't think there's a laboured sentence in here. It's so elegantly, so beautifully written... one of those books I think I could read again and again, just for the repeated experience of that prose. Especially when read on a warm summer's evening... I covet that prose, I really do.
The story itself is both simple and horribly not. There are two adolescent boys, best friends, and in a moment of thoughtlessness, of petty jealousy, one does something that alters the other's life forever. He instantly regrets it, and does his best to atone, but there are fracture lines running through the relationship now, places that don't bear looking at too closely, and all of this is set in the beginnings of WW2 in America, in a school where all the students are very soon to be subject to the draft. Which is something else none of them can bear to realistically face, because the stories of war are quite different to the realities and that, too, is a gap they are all suspicious of and so the last school year before adulthood, that last golden summer of looking away, gets thinner and more false as time goes on. It's so quietly and beautifully told, and it's just so, so good.
The story itself is both simple and horribly not. There are two adolescent boys, best friends, and in a moment of thoughtlessness, of petty jealousy, one does something that alters the other's life forever. He instantly regrets it, and does his best to atone, but there are fracture lines running through the relationship now, places that don't bear looking at too closely, and all of this is set in the beginnings of WW2 in America, in a school where all the students are very soon to be subject to the draft. Which is something else none of them can bear to realistically face, because the stories of war are quite different to the realities and that, too, is a gap they are all suspicious of and so the last school year before adulthood, that last golden summer of looking away, gets thinner and more false as time goes on. It's so quietly and beautifully told, and it's just so, so good.
My goodness but this is dire. The premise itself is silly enough - a prophecy concerning the glove of Darth Vader which, surviving the explosion of the Death Star over Endor because that is what gloves do, is the mark of the new leader of the dark side - but the execution is mindbogglingly dumb. Apparently the Emperor had a three-eyed son, called Trioculus if you couldn't grasp it, but he's not the only three-eyed character. There's another one called Triclops, because apparently if you're of this species that is the only sort of name you can have. (I am picturing human characters called Bipedal and Opposable Thumb, but they don't turn up because only aliens name their children after the normal characteristics of their race.) That's not even getting into the subplot where Whaledons, led by a white whaledon called Leviathor, are sucked by whirlpools into submarines to be harvested for their blubber and I'm losing IQ points just by relating this, I swear.
This is very good - as this series goes on, the characterisation improves no end. Even Ged is tolerable, though he is, as usual, the least interesting character here. But Lebannen, Tenar, and Alder are very well drawn. Le Guin's prose remains a thing of quiet beauty, also, so that alone makes this worth reading. I do think the plot may not be quite as successful, though. The confrontation between the dragons and the people of Earthsea has been a long time coming, and I appreciate that there is compromise and good sense on both sides, but the element of the wall and the liberation of the dead does not affect me in the way that perhaps it should. Certainly it is difficult to compare it with, for instance, the outstandingly lovely freeing of the dead from their sterile eternity in Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass and not have it come off worse. The wonderful restraint that Le Guin shows in her prose can sometimes damp down, I think, the emotion of the big moments, and I think it does so here - although it does not help that the climax of this novel, for me, seems a little rushed. But even so, it's still an excellent book... if not, perhaps, a perfect one.
My sister and I had all the Beatrix Potter books when we were kids, and I've recently come across them again. All I remembered about Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle was that it was my mum's favourite. (Mine was the creepy, horrifying Samuel Whiskers, where my sister liked Squirrel Nutkin best.) And rereading this one, I don't know what Mum was thinking. It's a hedgehog that does laundry. A particularly servile hedgehog at that, and there's only so much excitement one can get from a list of things to be washed. The illustrations, usually the best part of any Potter book, are more on the little girl than the hedgehog, which is basically dressed as a bundle of what she hasn't laundered yet.
It's pretty bloody bizarre, even by Potter standards, but even so it's just not very interesting.
It's pretty bloody bizarre, even by Potter standards, but even so it's just not very interesting.
There are so many wonderful words in this book! Some of them are made up I'm sure - such as those in the nonsense songs of the mice - but others are just terribly old-fashioned and have since fallen out of use, so it's fun to be introduced to them again.
This is a fairly obvious little book, and you know exactly what's going to happen once the tailor saves the mice, but it's still so charmingly done that it's a pleasure to read. Though there's a sort of tailing off that doesn't tell anything of Simpkin, the tailor's cat and repentant villain of the piece, who is by far the most interesting character. Given that the mice are providing stitching and lucre, one hopes that poor old Simpkin spends the rest of his life supping on sausages instead of rodent.
This is a fairly obvious little book, and you know exactly what's going to happen once the tailor saves the mice, but it's still so charmingly done that it's a pleasure to read. Though there's a sort of tailing off that doesn't tell anything of Simpkin, the tailor's cat and repentant villain of the piece, who is by far the most interesting character. Given that the mice are providing stitching and lucre, one hopes that poor old Simpkin spends the rest of his life supping on sausages instead of rodent.
"Jemima Puddle-Duck was a simpleton: not even the mention of sage and onions made her suspicious."
This is goddamn hilarious. I don't remember ever being particularly struck by this one as a kid, but reading it now, for the first time in decades, I am enormously amused. I don't know what I find funnier - that dimwitted duck making a nest from the feathered remains of the previous victims of her foxy host, or the fact that, after she is saved from said fox by some friendly dogs, come specifically to help her, those friendly dogs eat her children. I should have shelved this as horror, but I was too busy cackling to care.
This is goddamn hilarious. I don't remember ever being particularly struck by this one as a kid, but reading it now, for the first time in decades, I am enormously amused. I don't know what I find funnier - that dimwitted duck making a nest from the feathered remains of the previous victims of her foxy host, or the fact that, after she is saved from said fox by some friendly dogs, come specifically to help her, those friendly dogs eat her children. I should have shelved this as horror, but I was too busy cackling to care.
This is an entertaining if slightly repetitive rhyming story about wee murderous Cherise, who does in her dopey aunts in a variety of ways. Frankly, given that none of them seem to suspect this endless series of "accidents", I classify them as "too stupid to live" and feel not a jot sorry. If I'd have read this at any other time I might have given it four stars, but it had the misfortune of being read directly after Jemima Puddle-Duck by Beatrix Potter, which for very, very black humour leaves this for absolute dead.
I know that Goodreads classes three stars as "liked it", but really this is not appropriate here. This is not a likeable book. It is valuable and reasonably interesting, although very dry, but I find it difficult to differentiate between the book and the author. Given it's a memoir of sorts, however, this is not an insurmountable point.
Basically, McGehee worked for the CIA in South Asia before and during the Vietnam conflict, fighting communism during the Cold War. The appalling history of CIA involvement in that region is well-known; I feel disinclined to go into it here. Suffice to say that the author, grinding his way to some actual understanding of the situation, as opposed to the understanding the CIA had decided upon in advance, became severely disillusioned. If I am supposed to feel sorry for him I don't. One of the blurbs on the back describes him as "a principled man" but I'm not particularly feeling that either. But then, he was never trained to be - certainly not by the CIA.
There's a small section at the beginning of the book that talks about his recruitment and training. As part of that recruitment, McGehee had to undergo a number of intelligence and personality tests, as it took a certain type to work for the CIA, or so they thought. Notable here is the brief focus on two areas. The first is that McGehee was assessed as being rather more flexible than the average recruit; he expresses surprise that they let him through, arguing that flexibility was not a particularly valued trait. I beg to differ. I mean, yes, there is intellectual flexibility, which McGehee shows eventually, realising that the standard approach to intelligence is not working. I can see how that might cause difficulties for the agents in charge of him. But you simply cannot recruit people for this type of work without banking on a certain moral flexibility, and he has that in spades. There's one point where he's talking about his involvement in the interrogation of Thai villagers. One teenage boy was so distressed by the accusations he took his own life. One man had to listen to the mock execution of his father by CIA agents in order to get him to talk. A similar approach was taken with the child of a mother suspected of communist loyalties. McGehee comments, "I was not particularly disturbed by these violations of human rights" (106) and you can't tell me that moral flexibility is not one of his defining traits. You just can't. He justifies it on the old, tired grounds of ends, means, omelette, but if you can support threatening to kill a child in order to torture a mother you are not a principled man. You are just not.
McGehee goes on to feel guilt over the results of American intervention in Vietnam, along with frustration that his own work - which indicated the futility of such a conflict - was ignored. The argument seems to be "If they had only listened, all this suffering could have been prevented!" Yet clearly he had no real problem with suffering when it was his plans being implemented, as was the case in the Thai region under his control, so there's a strong part of me suspects that this turn to principles is fuelled - at least in part - by misplaced anger at being taken for a mug by the institution he has given his life to.
Because he is, frequently, and that's where the second characteristic of those personality tests comes in. Washed out of recruitment early were those people who showed a tendency to think for themselves. Closely related to this, I feel, is curiosity. The people described here seem to have none. Their intellect - impressive in other areas as it may be - is absolutely stagnant. The most shocking sentence in the book, a sentence far worse than the blase dismissal of torture, is this: "Although I had been in the CIA for 20 years, I really never had attempted to understand communism on its own terms" (182). HOW STUPID CAN YOU BE? HOW INSULAR, AND HOW INCURIOUS? He's working on China at one point, trying to stem Chinese communism, and he never bothers to read Mao.
If I'm trying to change someone's mind about something, I not only need to know what they think, but why they think it. How this very basic technique bypasses this author (and many of his colleagues) I do not know. Well yes, I do. They're unimaginative, intellectually lazy, and hold no more than superficial interest in the world around them. They are, in fact, recruited for these very failings.
I sincerely hope that the CIA has raised its standards since this book was published, but given the intellectual giant currently running that country, who is lionised by half its population, I very much fucking doubt it.
Principled intelligence my arse.
Basically, McGehee worked for the CIA in South Asia before and during the Vietnam conflict, fighting communism during the Cold War. The appalling history of CIA involvement in that region is well-known; I feel disinclined to go into it here. Suffice to say that the author, grinding his way to some actual understanding of the situation, as opposed to the understanding the CIA had decided upon in advance, became severely disillusioned. If I am supposed to feel sorry for him I don't. One of the blurbs on the back describes him as "a principled man" but I'm not particularly feeling that either. But then, he was never trained to be - certainly not by the CIA.
There's a small section at the beginning of the book that talks about his recruitment and training. As part of that recruitment, McGehee had to undergo a number of intelligence and personality tests, as it took a certain type to work for the CIA, or so they thought. Notable here is the brief focus on two areas. The first is that McGehee was assessed as being rather more flexible than the average recruit; he expresses surprise that they let him through, arguing that flexibility was not a particularly valued trait. I beg to differ. I mean, yes, there is intellectual flexibility, which McGehee shows eventually, realising that the standard approach to intelligence is not working. I can see how that might cause difficulties for the agents in charge of him. But you simply cannot recruit people for this type of work without banking on a certain moral flexibility, and he has that in spades. There's one point where he's talking about his involvement in the interrogation of Thai villagers. One teenage boy was so distressed by the accusations he took his own life. One man had to listen to the mock execution of his father by CIA agents in order to get him to talk. A similar approach was taken with the child of a mother suspected of communist loyalties. McGehee comments, "I was not particularly disturbed by these violations of human rights" (106) and you can't tell me that moral flexibility is not one of his defining traits. You just can't. He justifies it on the old, tired grounds of ends, means, omelette, but if you can support threatening to kill a child in order to torture a mother you are not a principled man. You are just not.
McGehee goes on to feel guilt over the results of American intervention in Vietnam, along with frustration that his own work - which indicated the futility of such a conflict - was ignored. The argument seems to be "If they had only listened, all this suffering could have been prevented!" Yet clearly he had no real problem with suffering when it was his plans being implemented, as was the case in the Thai region under his control, so there's a strong part of me suspects that this turn to principles is fuelled - at least in part - by misplaced anger at being taken for a mug by the institution he has given his life to.
Because he is, frequently, and that's where the second characteristic of those personality tests comes in. Washed out of recruitment early were those people who showed a tendency to think for themselves. Closely related to this, I feel, is curiosity. The people described here seem to have none. Their intellect - impressive in other areas as it may be - is absolutely stagnant. The most shocking sentence in the book, a sentence far worse than the blase dismissal of torture, is this: "Although I had been in the CIA for 20 years, I really never had attempted to understand communism on its own terms" (182). HOW STUPID CAN YOU BE? HOW INSULAR, AND HOW INCURIOUS? He's working on China at one point, trying to stem Chinese communism, and he never bothers to read Mao.
If I'm trying to change someone's mind about something, I not only need to know what they think, but why they think it. How this very basic technique bypasses this author (and many of his colleagues) I do not know. Well yes, I do. They're unimaginative, intellectually lazy, and hold no more than superficial interest in the world around them. They are, in fact, recruited for these very failings.
I sincerely hope that the CIA has raised its standards since this book was published, but given the intellectual giant currently running that country, who is lionised by half its population, I very much fucking doubt it.
Principled intelligence my arse.
City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris
Jeff VanderMeer, Michael Moorcock, Eric Schaller
I read one of the Ambergris novels a little while ago and really enjoyed it - hence the decision to read this. It's a collection of four novellas, and it doesn't really match Shriek for enjoyment value. To be honest, it's really more two and a half stars, rounded up. It's not the prose, which is certainly accomplished. It's not the setting, which I continue to find fascinating. It's certainly not the sly sense of humour that underpins it all, which I really enjoy. I think it's the length. Which is an odd thing to say about short(er) fiction, as I usually love it, but this wandered on far too long for my taste. The book's introduced by Michael Moorcock, and he compares VanderMeer to Mervyn Peake, who is one of my absolute favourite fantasy writers (coincidentally, I've recently been rereading Peake, in editions also introduced by Moorcock). There's some justification in this - especially in that baroque, grotesque, often comic tone that both writers use. Peake wanders in his prose as well, far more than Vandermeer, but the difference is I never find myself thinking "Would you just get on with it already!" with Peake, and there were numerous places in City of Saints and Madmen where this was the only thing I was thinking. Peake's prose is sharper, more biting, more grotesque - more compelling, as far as I'm concerned.
I tell you though, despite the often enjoyable muted black humour in this collection, there was one moment of real laughter. In the glossary of "The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris", the entry for SCATHA describes it as "A wretched place, full of novelists who think 500 words where one will suffice is a sign of sophistication. Ambassadors from Scatha have rarely liked Ambergris very much" (138). I am choosing to read this as the twisted self-deprecation I hope it to be.
I tell you though, despite the often enjoyable muted black humour in this collection, there was one moment of real laughter. In the glossary of "The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris", the entry for SCATHA describes it as "A wretched place, full of novelists who think 500 words where one will suffice is a sign of sophistication. Ambassadors from Scatha have rarely liked Ambergris very much" (138). I am choosing to read this as the twisted self-deprecation I hope it to be.