octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

A hill in the middle of a great city. A flock of smuggled and abandoned birds, certainly not indigenous to the San Francisco environment in which they find themselves living. And a man who has been homeless for many years, and who is constantly on the verge of being so again, scraping by doing odd jobs and living in a single mouldy room. He's not a scientist. He doesn't know anything about birds. He doesn't know much about anything, to be honest, and seems paralysed by a spirituality he can't really define or defend.

It's not a mix one would think would lead to something wonderful, and yet it has. Perhaps the lack of scientific training is a bonus. There didn't seem to be any local experts on the conures that Bittner could talk to anyway, so he's left to observe their behaviour with no preconceptions, and no foolish idea about birds not having personalities. (Of course they do.) And so, over a period of several years, he gets interested in the birds, starts to interact with them, and his learning about them coincides with him getting his life together, and coming to understand his place - and theirs - in the universe. It's a really interesting story, and Bittner makes the parrots come alive on the page. It's easy to empathise with them... which is, of course, as it should be.

This was excellent. It's an edited collection of writing themed around women's relationship with nature, and its strength is in its variety. Most of the pieces included here are essays, but there's a handful of poems and the odd short story, come from scientists and poets and everything in between. Really, glancing down the table of contents is enough to lure anyone in - Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Ursula Le Guin, Temple Grandin, Leslie Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Diane Ackerman, Denise Levertov, and more. And what's most striking about all the pieces together is how personal they are. This is especially true of the naturalists, who (almost to a woman) seem to have disdained the typical scientific approach of rigid objectivity and lack of emotion. Indeed, as several of them point out, they've been able to succeed so well at what they do precisely because they aren't as wedded to the narrative of nature-as-something-to-be-controlled as some of their male colleagues are. Again and again the theme of interconnection comes up, the idea of human as part of the natural world and not the head of it, and a focus, too, on interconnection between species, and the ability to communicate with them.

This is one of those books you could have on a shelf and pick up every so often, flip to a random page, and read. A lot of what's been included here are excerpts from other works, and I really want to go look a lot of them up, because the writing is generally so approachable, and so polished, that it would be a pleasure to read more of it.

I'm in two minds about this one. It was written long ago, and as a historical novel at that, so all the period racism is likely accurate but doesn't make it any more enjoyable to read. It's also not my usual fare... basically, the Night Riders are a sort of emerging union of tobacco farmers who are trying to band together, with increasing levels of violence, in order to get better prices for their crops from tobacco companies. Being pro-union myself, this is something I would normally have sympathy for, but that violence - and I am aware that violence was a significant part of the union movement - makes nearly all the characters increasingly unsympathetic as they get sucked further and further into some really dodgy behaviour. And, you know, stories with unlikeable protagonists can be great, but there's so many of them here, and they're nearly all so unpleasant that I can't really bring myself to sympathise with any of them. The fall of the main character, initially presented as a decent man, is, I think I am supposed to feel, some sort of rural American tragedy, but after he hurts his wife the way he does he's no longer a tragedy to me, he's someone who is just plain irredeemable, and my opinion stands despite the technical accomplishment of what Warren's accomplished here, this sucking maelstrom of poor choices that just drags character after character down and down.

All that aside, I very nearly gave this four stars, because whatever my problems with the characters, the prose is just so accomplished. It slips down so easily that the book felt a whole lot shorter than its near 500 page count would credit. And this, I understand, is a first novel. Well, I was impressed... but it is flawed in a way that a lot of first novels are flawed, and for Warren and Night Rider that flaw comes in the ending. This increasingly claustrophobic story is interrupted, in the second to last chapter, by a really tedious digression that drops all momentum dead for me. The whole of this very long chapter is a minor character recounting his life as a buffalo hunter. It's so irrelevant, and it goes on for so long, and it's just adding one more unpleasant character to the rest as he goes on about slaughtering both buffalo and Native Americans, and all I could feel was relief when it was finally over and the wish that Warren had found it within himself to kill a darling, because if ever there was a time for such a killing, it was then.

Flawed but interesting. I plan to read Warren's All the King's Men soon, so I'm interested to see how it stacks up.

This is a good idea but it has a particularly ill-thought-out execution. The basic concept is that this is an introductory primer, a field guide for people who are starting pretty much from zero in identifying the animals (the vast majority of entries here are animals) in their North American surroundings. So far, so good... but note the title, please. It is a guide to urban wildlife. Now, you can certainly find E. coli and bread yeast in cities, but why on Earth are they in a book like this? A significant portion of the book is the opening section on microscopic organisms... is this meant to be a guide for people who carry microscopes and Gram stains around the local park? The other end of the scale is equally ridiculous. I don't know why a humpback whale has been classed as urban wildlife, but I am not buying it. There is just so much here that doesn't seem relevant; it just doesn't do what it says on the tin. Why not get rid of that whole microbial section and add more plants than the 3-4 pages tucked in at the back of the book? Aren't people getting into nature-watching more likely to see trees than amoebas and bacteriophages? Finally, for a basic guide, the information given is absolutely bare bones. A lot of the entries don't even give a range, or a small map of the country where the entry might be found.

It's not completely dire, but it's ridiculously and unhelpfully unfocused.

One of the things about having shelves at Goodreads is that I'm forced to consider what shelves a book should be on. For years I've wavered on the difference between children's books and young adult books, because a lot of them could go either way. When reading this, however, I had a moment of clarity, and it's not going to make decisions about classification a done deal in future (hey, I'm a biologist, I live by classification), but it's something that should be noted.

It's not cut and dried, I think, but there's a question of power. Carter and Sadie, the two protagonists here, are 14 and 12 respectively. They discover that they've got magic powers, a royal heritage and so forth. They're special. They've always been special, and when shit hits the fan a protective god, a stunning new magical ability, or something turns up in order to reinforce what every powerful new character tells them: that they are the specialist special kids who have ever been born, and so on. It's wish fulfillment fantasy for kids. Nothing wrong with that! It's entertaining. And it's clearly appealing, especially to kids. But I compare this with a young adult protagonist - such as Katniss from The Hunger Games, for example - and the approach is quite different. There, the main character isn't special at all. They're an ordinary person whose entry into adventure and trauma is defined by choice, by simply not tolerating existing conditions any longer. It's that much more realistic - ordinary people standing up, rather than destiny and fate and gifts bestowed from on high. The wish fulfillment has changed, is what I'm saying. It's no longer readers identifying with the secretly special magical wonder child, it's them identifying with the person who has nothing to fall back on but their own poor abilities and chooses to take a stand regardless. And maybe I'm just getting old, but I find that far more appealing.

The Red Pyramid is likeable enough. It's fun. It's too long, I think, and gets a bit samey-same by the end, but as I said: it gave me some clarity about books in general, and there's value in that.

I've read a few of Barry's comic collections and really enjoyed them, so I thought I'd give her novel a go. (It's periodically illustrated with artwork, though not enough that I'd call it a graphic novel.) Anyway, Cruddy didn't do it for me, which is a shame. I admired parts of it but didn't particularly enjoy it - and not because it isn't well done, because I think in a lot of ways that it is. The prose is very clever, being simultaneously simplistic and not-at-all, and it the characterisation of the deeply disturbed young protagonist Roberta, who is narrating the story, is convincing.

The problem is everything else, in that it just doesn't suit me as a reader. Roberta is a traumatised teen who is telling the story of a childhood roadtrip with her abusive father, and he is awful. She is not much better, and if this tot is murdering any number of people to survive (and she is) the sheer nastiness of pretty much everyone here put me off entirely. Teen Roberta, who is doing drugs with a circle of equally alienated friends, is a little bit better off, but the present-day parts aren't as interesting as the flashbacks, and the flashbacks are only interesting because they are so horrid, and for me that is an interest that fades very quickly.

There's not a single character here that I like, or that I would willingly spend any (more) time with. I can appreciate Barry's technique, but I was glad when it was over.

Moral of the story: house renovation will lead to a screaming death.

That makes this novella sound both more and less interesting than it actually is. Ivan Ilych, a decent enough man entirely ordinary in his sins - the greatest is superficiality - gives himself a small injury while redecorating the new family home. It initially appears to be nothing, but the consequences of this little mishap are deadly, and poor old Ivan has a fairly unpleasant death given that even upper middle class people like himself are still bound by the limitations of the medical science of the time. He's in constant pain, the last three days of his life are pretty much agonised shrieking even with opium, but the bigger problem, for Ivan, is that he's dying at all. Yes, men are mortal, but that has always seemed to apply to other people, and his inevitable death, approaching as it is, must be faced somehow. (Ivan faces it with grumpiness and denial, mostly.) I think the end is meant to be uplifting, as he recognises his sins and has an extremely mild, almost religious acceptance of his end, but the conclusion strikes me as a little bit rushed, to be honest. It's still an enjoyable piece of writing, though, and more importantly for someone who has waded through Anna Karenina and is staring down the barrel of War and Peace, it is short.

I do love short.

The oldest epic poem in existence, this has been on my reading list for ages. And it's so worth reading - the Gilgamesh myth has bubbled beneath the literature of (literal) millennia, and there are familiar things here that, when reading, you realise where they actually came from.

Honestly, as an epic poem I don't love it as much as Beowulf, but in his introduction Mitchell argues for a genuine subtlety here (that the Beowulf poem admittedly lacks) when it comes to questions of good and evil. This is a world with a lot more grey in it, and although I can't say that I actually like either of the heroes, I didn't particularly like Beowulf as a person either. But then I'm not sure epics like these are read for character-building. They're read for sources and inspiration and image and common culture, and in that this translation is a success I think. Granted, I can only claim that with half-knowledge, as I've not read any other translation of Gilgamesh before and so have nothing to compare it to. Still, Mitchell's focus has been on producing an accessible edition, so that readers can read for all those things listed above. Both the poetry itself, and the context-giving introduction, are clear and compelling. It may not be the most scholarly version of this story out there, but it takes great pleasure in the sharing of it.

I read and reviewed each of the comics collected here separately, so this is basically for my own records. The individual comics all got four stars from me, so it was a no-brainer what the collection would receive. This was a very, very enjoyable book. The combination of historical horror with creature horror, and how both could contribute to dehumanisation and madness, was really effective. Furthermore, the art was excellent. I wouldn't call it beautiful, exactly, but with its limited range of colours and bleak aesthetic it was certainly striking, and matched perfectly with the story.

You know, after seemingly endless avalanches of nothing but miserable fantasy, all that grimdark why-do-you-even-bother-being-alive shite, it's really nice to have a fantasy that's all about finding happiness and doing good. Fitting, then, that the main character is a capybara, famed as they are for their laid-back attitude and willingness to make friends with any number of species. This particular capybara is a pirate, which is ridiculous but just plain fun. The author notes in the introduction that people would light up when told about pirate capybaras, and that's been my own experience when telling others about this book. It's an idea that just makes people smile.

There's no wider story here. Rather, it's a collection of loosely connected short stories, all set in the same universe and with the same characters, and they are all likeable. My particular favourite is Agnes the kraken, because I will never not like tentacular monsters. Agnes is only one of a wider cast, however, and the whole thing is just imaginative and original and relentlessly positive. I really appreciate that.