octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I love this. I don't even care that much about the story, which is fine, even occasionally affecting - it's the art that's truly incredible, this incredible mix of form and colour. The bulk of this is set in the trenches of World War One, with chlorine gas seeping a sick, luminous green through pages and trenches, mixed with rivers of blood and reapers and skeleton ghost horses. Everything's been thrown on the page here and it somehow all just works. I'm left to think that this is one of those books that I'm going to have to buy a copy of, because being able to borrow the library version just isn't going to be sufficient. The artist is incredible, all respect to her because this is amazing.

I do wish, however, that the collection had gotten rid of all the repetitive, not-very-interesting technical stuff that is the back matter. There's quite a lot of it, and after a really strong conclusion, this is the very definition of ending on a whimper rather than a bang. Half the impact is lost because these useless pages exist as padding. (When I get hold of a copy of my own, at least I know for the future to stop when the story does.)

Well. It has taken me a long time, but I've finally waded my way through a Tolstoy novel. (I've tried and failed before.) I don't enjoy him as much as Dostoevsky, but Anna K. is certainly an extremely well-written book, though it seems to me that Levin is as much - if not more - the main character than Anna, or either of the other members of that ill-fated triangle. Anna herself is certainly compelling, and despite my belief that the book is overlong, her slow descent into misery is hideously detailed, and her final chapter is a masterpiece of unravelling. It's a pity, in a way, that the book doesn't end there, but instead there's another 50 odd pages of wrap-up, most of which is Levin, who by this time is clearly acting as a mouthpiece for Tolstoy himself, or so I suspect anyway.

It's difficult not to review this book without the phrase "train wreck" making an ill-judged appearance (all I knew in advance of the plot was Anna's final moments) but regardless of this it was plain from the get-go that it was all going pear-shaped for her, and in this it was like waiting for the inevitable horrible crash. Not a particularly cheerful book, but painfully observed I think.

(Had to add this review again, copied from the original, because there was another record and Goodreads seemed to get only halfway through merging them, whatever. I'm sick of lists telling me I haven't read books when I have.)

This was okay, but it's all so overwrought. It's like Lovecraft has no faith that something simple, done well, can be scary - he has to throw everything he possibly can at the wall, pile it up to ever more ridiculous heights, and when the thing starts to topple because of its own bloated indulgence I'm meant to be scared that it might fall on me, I suppose. I'm not. This approach leaves me absolutely cold, and while I was mildly interested in places - very mildly, it's taken me days and days to finish because I stopped halfway through and couldn't muster up the interest to rush back to it - I can't help but think that somewhere, under all this extraneous bullshit, is a potentially decent story that's struggling not to suffocate... and failing.

This is an odd book to be reading right now. A collection of columns from a political journalist, mostly focused on Texan politics in the 1980s and the 1990s. I suspect it would be funnier if I knew the people she was talking about, but it's still entertaining, and Ivins writes in a fond, relaxed, insulting style that pulls very few punches towards the hapless idiots of her state legislature. And yeah, it's amusing, but reading this at the time when Fucking Trump - a creature more vacuum than man, with all the substance of a spray-painted meringue and none of the meringue's intelligence - has nearly been re-elected President, well... As a non-American who lives on the other side of the world, it can be hard to understand the decisions of the American electorate. Then I read this and realised that parts of that electorate had been electing morons all along. I mean seriously, some of the politicians that Ivins describes in this... they are stupid and corrupt on a level at which I have frankly never seen before. Even allowing for exaggeration, both Ivins and my own, I still think I've experimented on some slightly smarter seaweeds in my time. The seaweeds were likely also more honest.

I just don't understand how voters put up with this shit. But clearly they do, and there's decades of form if Ivins is to be believed. No wonder she leans so hard into humour. It's either that or cry.

Horror from the 1920s which initially appears to be of the haunted house type, and turns out to be something not quite that. (I hesitate to say what because of spoilers, but suffice to say something dodgy is afoot.) It's not actually that long, less than 300 pages, but it's taken me ages to get through it. And the thing is I've been enjoying it, but every time I pick it up I want to go to sleep. In fairness to Young, I don't think it's him... I just don't have the concentration for reading this week, and this is more of a cerebral horror. Which is to say very little happens - or it least it happens at a remove, because all the action is in the past and this is a group of friends, on holiday, each telling parts of the story to the others in an attempt to figure out what's actually happened. And it's nicely written, if rather patronising in places (product of the times, I suspect) but it's only mildly creepy, and it's hampered by an end that's both abrupt and honestly pretty clumsy.

Interesting more for its place in the history of the genre - I haven't reach much from this period - than it is for itself. I'll keep the old second hand copy I have, though, as I suspect I'll reread it again one day when I've got more brain space for it and am in the mood for some really low key horror.

"You can't trust anyone who sleeps with monsters." Or so Anita is hearing all the time, from the people around her who haven't developed the voluntary equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome, willfully convincing themselves that sleeping with monsters isn't that bad. It is, you stupid woman... but I think what saves it is that Anita's aware, even if she doesn't like to think about it, that what she's doing is monumentally foolish. For someone who's always been relatively clear-sighted about her own character, the sort-of conclusion to the love triangle that's plagued this series for the last few books undoes that. Scared off the werewolf boyfriend - admittedly, seeing him eat someone would give any sensible girl pause - she runs off to the bed of the vampire boyfriend, because apparently she can tell herself he's not a total monster because she hasn't seen him do something she can't excuse yet. I bet the day is coming, though, and I'm hoping for that day just because I find Jean-Claude as interesting as watching paint dry and any excuse to get shot of him is good enough. Seven books in, and I still think he's a total bore.

What I do find attractive, though, and what is for me hands-down the most appealing part of these books, is the political tension that having supernatural creatures as an accepted part of society results in. There's a constant pushing of boundaries, from just about every player and every species, and a constant jockeying for influence and control, back room dealings and legal maneuverings and sudden explosions of horrific violence, because the whole situation is a powder keg waiting for a fundamentalist of some stripe to blow. As happens in this volume, where the Vampire Council (or parts thereof) come to town. I find this part of the series so compelling; I just wish that Anita's love life didn't take up so much of the focus because it's not nearly as interesting. Still, fingers crossed the love triangle's over for the meantime, even if the choice between nice-but-boring and flat-out-boring is not exactly settled in the least irritating direction. (I am desperate for Edward to return and start cutting off body parts at every smarmy repetition of "ma petite," I really am.)

P.S. with all the fuss about hiding the gun under the dress and Anita flashing the room every time she has to retrieve it... for goodness sake, invest in an empire waist dress with fake pockets so you can just reach through the fabric. Make it a baby doll type thing if you're that concerned with looking sexy while carrying concealed arms, because what you're doing now just ain't practical. There. Problem solved.

This was excellent. Depressing as hell - as it should be, concerning the subject matter - but excellent. There was a line in the last few pages that made chills go up and down my spine. The narrator says, quite simply, "We are superfluous even to ourselves," and that is essentially what the young men sent off to die in the trenches of WW1 actually were. Expendable.

Paul, the 19 year old narrator who is encouraged to enlist with the rest of his school friends, sacrifices to a conflict none of them understand, tells a story of life at the front. It's incomprehensible and damaging in all the worst ways, as his friends all die around him, and the book ends with yet another death. I'd say the last was the most important of all, but of course it isn't. It's just more of the same, and indistinguishable from the rest. Remarque, himself a soldier in the trenches of that war, uses his experience to good effect, if such a terrible thing can be said, producing a disorienting and enormously successful sense of waste, of the distant callousness that can send these adolescents (and millions like them) into the most hideous meat-grinder imaginable. The end is not deserved, but it is almost inevitable. Reading All Quiet on the Western Front, it is hard to see it ending any other way.

It's been a while since I read Dead Until Dark - about three and a half years, according to the Goodreads record, which honestly gave me a bit of a shock... I thought it was only last year! But I enjoyed that first book and always meant to carry on with the series, so when I saw Living Dead in Dallas on the library bookshelf it reminded me to keep going. I'm glad it did, because I liked this one just as well... even if I did look for a summary of Dead Until Dark on the internet to remind me who was who. Once I started reading, most of it came back anyway.

Much of the action here takes place in Dallas, which I think is a sensible decision. Clearly the small town Sookie lives in is a hotbed of supernatural activity, but broadening the world building by introducing other places makes her home town look less like a very strange aberration, and more like the norm. I mean, a strange new norm, but still. A lot of other fantasies I read of this type are set solidly in big cities, but I like the almost rural tone of this... it has that very small-town-community feel, where everyone knows everyone else's business and it's not always a good thing, though it does make for drama. Sookie herself continues to be the strongest point of the book for me - I enjoy her determinedly normal, friendly personality and how she interacts with other people - and Bill got fleshed out a little more so I'm not as indifferent to him as I was in the last book. The couple of pages of backstory he got at the end here rounded him out some, which helped.

I liked this much better than the first one - but then I will never not like stories about creepy, sentient plants. In this volume, Kip gets sent on a rescue mission to the planet Botanicus, where another space scout has disappeared. She's fallen under the influence of said creepy plants, and Kip has to figure out how to rescue both her and himself. How he does it is actually quite clever, and if the ecology here is simplistic in the extreme, it's still a way to get kids thinking about insect pollination and how necessary it is to sustaining a lot of plant life... especially as bee populations around the world are plummeting. A quick, fun read.

I really enjoyed this! It's an odd mix of genre, too - a science fiction story at heart, but wrapped in all the trappings of Gothic horror. Bert, the protagonist, finds she is the heir to a dilapidated castle set in the remotest part of the Italian Alps, as well as the noble title that goes with it. The history of her family, previously kept from her courtesy of a grandfather who ran away to the new world, slowly becomes clear, explaining not only the restrictions of her new life, but also the limitations of the old. A painful history of miscarriage becomes an explainable thing, as the genetic reality of Bert's ancestors, and of her living cousins, provides a commentary on human evolution... and the conservation of failing family lines in the face of extinction.

I don't want to give too many details, so as not to spoil this for others, but that genre mix makes this an extremely appealing story, and one that slots interestingly into the history of how evolution and relict populations is portrayed in science fiction.