octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is the first issue in this series that hasn't blown me away. Don't get me wrong, I still liked it, but it was mostly backstory and fighting, without the emotional resonance that the other issues have had for me. (Why does everyone always want to be gods?! Every time I come across this in fiction, it is reliably the least interesting thing about the story that it's in.)

I will say, though, that the cover is gorgeous. Best artwork so far! 

I think it's fair to say that not a lot actually happens in this story, in which Peter Grant attempts to fix a car that won't start and ends up helping a little old lady get home. That's not to say that it isn't a pleasant read, because it is - it's just the sort of pleasant read where everyone's trying to do the right thing, even if they're going about it in the wrong way, and it all ends up alright regardless. Or at least as alright can be when a brain tumour is involved.

I quite like stories like this, that are very low drama. And quite by coincidence, I have the Alan Sillitoe collection, which I have never read, on loan from the library at the moment. It's sitting on top of a bookshelf, waiting for me to finish this similarly-titled story and get on to reading it for a change. Maybe in a bit. 

Written for teens, this is an accessible book geared towards critical thinking as it applies to news sources - particularly fake news. A lot of the techniques here are fairly basic, but it's an educational text aimed at critical beginners, essentially, so it works as an entry-level text. The most interesting thing, for me, was the historical examples of fake news, with examples ranging from ancient Egypt to 18th century America to WW2.

The real hook is that it's written by a former CIA analyst, but I have to admit that the lack of critical engagement here grates a bit. The book begins and ends with Otis' recollection of a quote carved onto the wall of the CIA: "And ye shall know the truth and the truth will make you free." As if the CIA itself hasn't been the cause of monstrous levels of misinformation in their own history, which Otis absolutely glosses over. It's a little hard to swallow the exhortations to rigour in fact-assessment when it's so patently directed outwards... and only outwards. Granted, the primary audience of this book is (presumably) American teens, but surely this should mean more attention should be given to their own government's dodgy practices, not less. 

Reading through this short story collection by Aaronovitch, and this is the first really funny one - there's poltergeist-like activity in a bookshop, and Peter and Leslie have to stay the night there and sort it out. Why they just can't go after hours on a Sunday or anything when it's still light I don't know, but it's kind of like those stupid ghost shows on the telly where they hang around at midnight with torches, I guess, instead of getting a good look at a time of day when they can actually see things.

Peter and Leslie have electricity enough to do actual reading so it's not actually the same, but you get my drift. Anyway, I'll never not like a haunted bookshop story. 

It's no secret that Teen Vogue has been, over the past few years, one of the shining lights in American journalism. In work like the articles collected in this book, they've certainly been more thoughtful about climate change than many of the mainstream news organisations - frankly, the less said about those places the better. So I was excited to read this, especially as the publisher's note at the front of the book says that the contributors here range from ten to twenty-five. Good writers all, and good for them. It makes the book accessible to young readers, I think, to have so many of them represented here.

The book's structured into three sections: reporting, activism, and intersectionality. That's useful, as is the continual linking of each of these concepts to each other as the book goes on. I do think that it falls quite often into repetition, which makes the read in places seem somewhat longer than it actually is, but then this is a collection of articles, not a narrative planned out in advance, and perhaps that's one of the risks an editor takes in a collection like this. 

This is absolutely fascinating!

I have to admit: I know very little about the history of Aboriginal Australia. I know very little about the history of Australia full stop, but had I been asked, I would have said, dredging from the vague corners of memory, that the Aborigines were a hunter-gatherer people. Where had I heard this? I don't know. It arrived in my brain by osmosis, I guess, and I never really thought to question it because I never really thought about it at all.

Well. Wasn't that a mistake. It turns out that the hunter-gatherer label, in this instance, is bullshit promulgated by the European colonists of Australia, because believing this themselves - often against the evidence of their own eyes! - made it easy for them to excuse stealing land and being generally awful people. Pascoe presents here the archeological and historical evidence for settled farming and food production in Aboriginal communities, actual townships, and more.

What really shocked me, and I suppose it shouldn't have, was all the evidence culled from settler records. I don't know how anyone with the tiniest iota of moral or intellectual honesty can stay in Aboriginal stone houses and claim that Indigenous Australians only had lean-to huts, or observe long-term farming practices and conclude that the land got that way naturally, or to actually eat stored supplies of someone else's grain and assert that no storage ever took place, because the people who stored the grain they were eating were nomads, and so it didn't really exist. I just... it's unbearably, insidiously vicious, is what it is.

I'm so glad I read this. What an excellent book. Everyone should read it! 

The best thing about this is the play on words of the title. Otherwise it's a fairly average story, entertaining but a bit slight, with an ending that's a little too abrupt for my tastes.

This is fun - a locked room mystery, except instead of a room someone's been murdered in a car in the middle of a traffic jam, and it seems that no one could possibly have done it without being seen. Fortunately, also stuck in this traffic jam is off-duty police officer Belinda Kidd, and she has to sort through all the bystanders and their multiple problems to get to the solution of who killed this apparently random victim.

It's a great concept, and it zips along nicely. Kidd is sympathetic - a middle-aged officer on the verge of burnout, ready to retire and navigating trauma and menopause - and I felt for her. I think this is a one-off, but if it turned into a series I'd read them, primarily because of the protagonist. I do think that Furniss might have gone a little overboard piling miserable life experiences onto her, but the story mostly avoids being overwrought there so I'm inclined to gloss over that particular issue. 

A quick, fun story written to coincide with the 2012 London Olympics. It's not, I'm quite happy to say, sports-related, bar a few throwaway references to an 1940s game of basketball. Not that I don't like sport, but, well, I've just not read that many good stories about it. I'd rather have magic, or in this case tasers. 

With tasers it's generally over quite quickly, you know who won, and there's very little chance of being forced to sit through overtime.

That's electricity for you. Better than sports any day. 

I enjoyed this, but for the life of me I can't figure out why Worf is on the cover. He has a decent supporting role in this, but this seems like a much better book for Troi to be on the cover of! After all, it's based around the theft of Betazoid artefacts from a major ceremony on Betazed, and she's primarily involved in getting them back. It's an interesting story - I like seeing some more exploration of an alien Star Trek culture that isn't Vulcan or Klingon, for a change - although I figured out the Ferengi twist before she did... which might actually underline Xiomara's legend, come to think of it, given my own lack of telepathic ability!

There's a secondary plot, too, about Crusher discovering a very different sort of life on a planet slated for terraforming. I remember reading, way back, a Trek novel of the original series, where Uhura and company were feeding new languages into the universal translator - I can't remember the title - but I really enjoyed that, and I liked the slow realisation of communication here too.

The one thing that didn't quite gel for me, though, was Picard's characterisation. His discomfort with Lwaxana Troi is both canon and legitimate - the woman is a lot - but his sulking his way through another culture's ceremonies isn't what I'd expect from a seasoned diplomat like Picard. It might not be his favourite part of the job, but before things went to custard he was unusually ungracious.