octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This book is a close look at the Maui myth (at least as it is told in the Cook Islands). Like most other New Zealanders I'm familiar with at least one version of Maui, and it was really interesting to get a closer look at some of the details, even if they weren't all familiar.

I have to admit I got a bit glazed over when it came to some of the analysis, though. Kauraka has a heavy emphasis on interpreting the myth through the Levi-Strauss model. Perhaps if that was more familiar to me it would have been easier to digest, but the focus on tables of features and how they related to each other kind of bogged me down a bit.

A collection of academic essays on The X-Files, albeit one that is necessarily limited because, at the time of publication, only three seasons had been aired. This does lead to some cross-over between the essays, with the same examples (and quotes) turning up again and again. That being said, it's still an interesting read (my favourite was the chapter by Leslie Jones on the mythological X-Files).

Unfortunately, in most chapters the turgid nature of the prose suffocates the main points of interest. Academic writing can be painful to read, and it's a shame the editors didn't get their contributors to tone down the worst of the excesses here.

A reprint of a book from the 1920s, and it shows. I don't mean that in a disparaging way - Villiers has collected a range of interesting information about good luck charms and mascots from a variety of sources. This includes some practices which sound quite old and strange indeed, but which she avers took place within the last 50 years (of her writing), or within living memory and so forth. Add on near a hundred years and it doesn't sound so fresh, is what I'm saying.

Interesting enough read, if a little didactic and not to be taken too seriously. Its main problem is the problem of so many other stories where a genius (or multitude thereof, as in this case) is the main character.

The big twist at the end was entirely foreseeable. In fact, when (the lauded even by other characters as the most genius genius ever to stalk the earth) Konev burst into his superior's room near the end of the book, all aflutter at plot and consequence, all I could think was "I figured this out 100 pages ago, you stupid disagreeable man."

If your character must be a genius, don't have him out-thought by a moderately intelligent but decidedly not-genius reader. That's the kind of idiocy that loses you an extra star - and I know Asimov can do better, because he has plenty of mystery stories I haven't seen through. This was just too obviously sloppy; the work of an author too interested in the science to give enough consideration to the plot.

Four New Zealanders spend two years driving around the world in the late sixties in a Ford Falcon. Given that they visited over 50 countries, some of them get relatively short shrift (Denmark is dismissed in a single sentence - it's too filled with dairy farms to be interesting to the four Kiwis, who have seen plenty of dairy farms at home - though having been to Copenhagen myself, I think they missed something special there).

The attitudes can be old-fashioned and even rude (if people don't want to be photographed don't keep doing it, you obnoxious git!), and I'm not particularly certain I'd like to travel with the author, as he can - and he admits this himself - be difficult and hot-tempered. But as a travel book, it succeeds in making me want to follow in their footsteps and go for a driving/camping tour of my own - though maybe not on the South American mountain roads! I'm sure they've improved in the decades since this book has been published, but I'm not good with heights at the best of times and some of the descriptions here made my stomach drop.

I thought this was fantastic. It's the story of the Erebus air disaster - rather, it's a story of the corona about it. Not just the crash, but the aftermath; the grief and search and explanation. Lovely and evocative, with an interesting use of primary sources sprinkled through.

I recently read the Tolkien translation of Pearl, and was so struck by it that I went in search of explanation because I knew I was missing a lot of what was going on. Kean's explanation is painfully thorough and she is in love with footnotes, but I can safely say that I now grasp the basics. I do wish, however, that she'd included translations of the Pearl quotes. Her Italian and Latin quotes (from the poet's literary influences) are all carefully translated under the original, but she seems to assume that if one is reading a lengthy study of the Pearl poem then one is fluent in Middle English. Which is a fair enough assumption on one hand, but the jacket cover trumpets this study as helping to make the poem approachable to the modern reader. I had to keep flipping between this and the Tolkien when I couldn't puzzle out word meanings on my own, so approachable it is not.

Published as New Zealand was on the cusp of moving to an MMP electoral system, this edition is a little outdated now but still an interesting read. It's very obviously an introductory textbook for politics students (which was how I got hold of it, back in the day), being both thorough and clearly written. For all its informational value, however, the prose is outstandingly bland even for a textbook.

Well, now I want to go off and learn about lapis lazuli. Lovely, sensual writing, especially when it comes to colour. The story itself is pleasant enough, though it becomes quite heavy-handed towards the end, especially in the Chinese section. Worth reading for the language if not for that.

I believe I actually understood most of what Davies was talking about! (Or at least I thought I understood it, which is a step up from a lot of astronomy books for me.) It's always good to see a book that purports to be written for laypeople actually, you know, be written for laypeople. And I was fascinated. Davies has a very lucid style, which makes the very interesting ideas he talks about clear and compelling. The diagrams were both simple and useful, and I liked the wry touches of humour and science fiction that leavened the cosmological concepts. Would definitely be willing to read more by this author in future!