octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I haven't read anything else in this series but, after reading this little short, I think I'd like to. It's set post-nameless apocalypse, with food stocks plummeting, and there's clearly something gone wrong with agriculture, because what's being grown is barely sufficient to maintain the population. In the midst of all the short dreary rations of porridge comes a strawberry, and it's a reminder of the dreams Mariah has been having, of her early childhood where everything was green and growing still. There's a nicely done sense of nostalgia, sort of a warm golden glow about the memories, but I'm more interested in the post-apocalyptic than the pre- here. I wanted to see more of the world Mariah was actually living in, as opposed to the past. Hence the interest in the rest of the series...

Bit of an uneven collection of essays here - of these, a small handful barely mention Hahn, so I'm not sure that the book has the most accurate choice of title. The main issue, though, lies with the prose. A number of the chapters are so enormously turgid that they are well nigh unreadable. Granted, I'm not a nuclear physicist (my background is in biology and science communication) but I should not be bored to death by science, no matter the discipline. The reason that this collection is getting three stars, though, is that there are three chapters which are genuinely interesting, as well as being actually well-written. Points to Fritz Krafft for his chapter on"Internal and External Conditions for the Discovery of Nuclear Fission by the Berlin Team" and Lawrence Badash for his chapter "Otto Hahn, Science, and Social Responsibility." The best chapter of the entire book, however - it really was fascinating - was Neil Cameron's "The Politics of British Science in the Munich Era." All credit to these three authors, for being the bright spots in an otherwise tedious text.

This is an interesting book, but it is deeply, deeply unfocused. The basic idea is that it's a collection of potted biographies of writers who engage with Arthurian literature in a significant way. These biographies are only part of each chapter, however, as they are used to provide context and commentary on each writer's particular interpretation of the mythos. Each chapter is relatively short - I think the average is ten to twelve pages - so the chapter authors have to be careful with their balance in such a limited space, and some of them achieve this a lot better than others. Some chapters, like the excellent study on Mark Twain, seamlessly move between biography and criticism, and give a valuable commentary on the text in question (in Twain's case, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court). About half the chapters, however, wander enormously. Half-way through the chapter on C.S. Lewis, for example, the author comments that such-and-such is the last of Lewis' Arthurian writing, and meanders on for pages more describing Narnia, which had little of relevance to do with anything. I like Lewis' works, and love Narnia, but I picked up this book to get context for Arthurian narratives, and that's not always what I got.

This was an enormous disappointment. Partly because it's just written above my level - I'm not a chemist, nor am I a physicist, and this is clearly directed at people who are, as Hahn recaps his professional discoveries for a professional audience. But mostly that disappointment is because this just doesn't do what it says on the tin.

I wanted to read this because I am interested in Otto Hahn, and wanted to learn more about his life and the type of person that he was. "An autobiography will do that," I thought, but bar a brief opening chapter on his childhood, this did no such thing. In fact, Hahn seemed to go out of his way to remove any personal thoughts or references at all. His wife and child, including the death of the latter? Nary a mention. His experiences during WW1, developing gas warfare with Fritz Haber, and any ethical difficulties he had with this work? Skipped entirely over. His reaction to the growing Nazi threat, and how it impacted his life, his (successful) help getting Lise Meitner out of Germany, how he was able to go on doing German science in WW2 like nothing was happening around him, his experience in an internment camp, his refusal to countenance nuclear weapons... nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

If I'd wanted to read his scientific papers, strung together (as a handful are in the extensive appendices) I would have done that. Apparently there's another autobiography by him out there, called My Life, and I hope it's an improvement on this one, but I don't know if I can bring myself to read it. This book has a specific audience, of people already in the know, and isn't particularly welcoming to anyone else. There are a handful of interesting passages, but mostly it is pretty dull, really. (less)

I got a couple of mild laughs out of this but honestly, it's just not that funny. Part of that, I think, is that it goes for the lowest hanging fruit, regardless of consistency. Yeah, Mulder's easy to lampoon as a loon, and the book actually does this quite successfully - except when it needs him to be rational, as when he's interviewing a series of people who think they've been abducted by aliens and suddenly, to make fun of them, the guy who's credulous enough to believe Barney the Dinosaur is eating children grows a brain. Likewise, when the aliens, who are the supposed compilers of these books, are brainstorming ways to undermine Scully's effectiveness, they focus on exploiting her religious beliefs (fair, that comes up a lot in the show), her sister's death (also fair, and the sequence with the Melissa-zombie was actually quite funny), but then it goes into 4-5 pages of fat and short jokes, making fun of her appearance, and... these aren't really things that Scully's ever been shown giving a damn about. I think the reasoning's gone: she's a woman, she must worry about her weight, that'll work. But it's that low-hanging fruit, and doesn't apply to Scully. Target her tanking career, that'd be funny. Target her dad's disappointment in her, make that amusing. Target her terrible clothes - that godawful pink and blue parka of "Darkness Falls." But satirise Scully, not some amorphous woman-shape in a trenchcoat. It's just all a bit lazy, really.

I've read far funnier fanfictions.

This... just isn't very good. Comics have clearly come a long way since these were first published. They're predictable, enormously simplistic, the art's not that appealing, and they're all a bit dull really. Mostly the stories here rely on old horror tropes of monsters and undead corpses and revenge from beyond the grave and so forth - and the last comic collected in this volume is entirely ripped off from Oscar Wilde. Now I don't mind retellings, and I love horror tropes generally, but this is so very basic in its approach that it's hard to find anything to admire about the story-telling.

Stripped of nearly all of its fiction, this is undoubtedly worse than the first issue, and it's no surprise at all that this, the second issue, was the last. What a tedious collection of wankery it is - pompous, pontificating, essentially unintelligible. The only thing saving it from a single star is all the artwork. That is genuinely interesting - full of geometry and abstract forms, there was not a single piece of artwork here that I didn't spend substantial time looking at. The poetry, however, is largely indifferent if not actually dreadful, but it's the essays on art (and note the placing of that apostrophe, Mr. Lewis, because the difference between "its" and "it's" clearly escapes you) that's where the rot sets in. Well, you can see my opinion above. Of course it can only be appreciated by intelligent minds, so says the editor, in response to those who didn't slaver over issue one, but all I can think is new clothes and emperors, and that the production of stuff like this, even over a century ago, is what gives intellectualism a bad name.

I note some people are tagging this novelette as paranormal romance, but I really don't think that it is. A book conservator and a security guard are working at a historic hall, where they come across a sad, lonely ghost and gently encourage him to move on to the afterlife. Neither are involved with him, but they do become involved with each other, so really it's more a normal romance with a supernatural backdrop. And it's easy and likeable, a quick little read, and (horror fan though I am) I still enjoyed that the ghost wasn't hostile in any way. I wonder if it's a little too short for my tastes, though - like Emily, the book conservator, I'm book mad, so I was far more invested in Emily's work at the haunted library than I was her relationships with either George or the ghost. Perhaps if more time had been spent with them I'd feel differently, but then again: old books! I'd probably still be drooling over the library...

Okay, this was a step up from Reindeer Manor, which was the first volume in this trilogy. Guest's writing is most enjoyable for me when he focuses on the histories of the houses in question. Maybe it's that I prefer the more objective tone, or that in some ways this book in particular almost has the feeling of linked short stories as the generations of spooky occurrences unfold (I particularly like short stories). Though I think for me personally, a large part of it is that much of Foxwood is given over to histories, so the focus really isn't on the experiences of the investigators. That's where Reindeer fell down for me - too much was happening to them, and it all got a bit frantic. Weinstein, the main character here, is much more a distanced chronicler of other people's experiences, and somehow I find that creepier.

The book did need proofreading, however. There were a lot of typos and general errors, and at one stage a phone call occurs on the 3rd of March, and the people on the phone agree to meet the next day. They do, but that day's the 3rd of March as well. Small stuff like that, which editing really should have caught.

I did not care much for this, I'm afraid. It's interestingly structured, but that's about all that appealed to me. Anderson, the dead protagonist of earlier volumes, left behind an unpublished manuscript of the various haunted houses he investigated. In going through these cases, and presenting a summary of them, his successor is influenced by the manuscript into investigations of his own, using his own family as subjects. (If nothing else, this series is full of unpleasant main characters.) So in some ways this reads like a collection of short stories more than anything else, but they're too scattered and not in-depth enough to be compelling as a group. More irritating than anything else, however, is the total lack of proofreading. The book is full of errors, and someone needs to sit the author down and teach him how to use an apostrophe as soon as humanly possible, because reading about the main character's "two boy's" is frankly painful.