octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I read and reviewed the three books in this trilogy separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The collected rating is an average of the individuals ratings: both The Haunting of Reindeer Manor and Texas Hauntings got one star from me, while Chronicles of Foxwood got two. Suffice to say, as a series I did not much care for it, sadly. A lot of that's down to the presentation, as the lack of proofreading was a consistent issue, but a lot of it was also due to the characters (almost uniformly unpleasant) and the hauntings themselves, which were frequently more crass than scary.

This is one of the better books in the series, at least so far. For once, Fucking Benny takes a back seat, and for the first time ever the focus is on Violet. I'm sure it won't last, as Warner ignores the girls most of the time, but for the moment this is a welcome change. Violet, the cat-lover, makes friends with two lonely old ladies who have a lot of cats, and whose lives are improved thereby. It's quiet and gentle and not much happens, but it's a kind little story at heart and I appreciate that. The mystery isn't much of one, but in a book this short it really doesn't need to be.

Sugar Cookie is, however, the stupidest name for a cat ever. Violet is too nice to change it, but I would have, first thing.

Oh, this is really not for me. This is one of my "list" books - basically, to broaden my reading I pick random lists on Goodreads and try to read my way through them. This tends to bring up books that I would never read normally, and sometimes that's turned out well and sometimes it hasn't. Look, I'm not religious. In the past, I've certainly come away with valuable things from Christian theologians such as C.S. Lewis or Lloyd Geering, but that's not the case with this book.

In his defence, McVey is doing something interesting here. It's basically a series of visualisations, imagining religiously positive qualities in the form of armour - imagine truth as a waist belt, for instance, and visualise putting it on to develop a greater reliance on truth in general. Which is actually quite an imaginative idea! It's not a visualisation that would work for me, but I can see how other people might find it helpful. It's just I can't get over the literalness of the argument. I mean: "This weapon [the helmet of salvation] sends demons to flight every time. It takes away their legal right to a person." I'm sorry, what?! Even if I believed in demons, which I don't, you'd have to go a long way, with a lot more supporting material, to make me believe demons had a legal right to anything. There's quite a lot like this. I just can't take it seriously.

Oh well, perhaps the next random religious book I come across in a Goodreads list will be more to my taste.

Oh, it took me forever to get through this. I was quite looking forward to it too! As a botanist and a speculative fiction writer myself, this should have been right up my alley. Alas, I could not get enthused. There were some genuinely interesting chapters in here. I particularly liked Jerry Määttä's chapter on John Wyndham, T.S. Miller's chapter on "Vegetable Love" and Alison Sperling's chapter on Jeff VanderMeer, but in all honesty a lot of the book blurred together for me. The main points are fair enough: that plants can be re-imagined to illustrate different forms of existence, and different relationships between species; that blurring boundaries between plants and non-plants (particularly humans) is a valuable way of illustrating this; and that Michael Marder requires substantial referencing. On these points the authors agree, and so do I. Yet despite their often very different approaches to said points, reading them reiterated over and over does come to be repetitive. Hence the blurring.

For some ungodly reason I have started trying to organise my Kindle - a process only made more difficult by the fact I keep interrupting said organisation to buy more books - and I found this, bought some years ago now. I have vague memories of reading it once before, so I just now read it again to make sure. It's only thirty odd pages, so it's a quick read.

It's also, I think, not for me. I bought this (so dim recollection tells me) in the days when I'd started writing poetry. I've had two collections published since then, both in small presses, and I was so glad not to have to format either myself. Credit where it's due: Lang has extremely simple instructions, but I am also extremely stupid at stuff like this, and even her very patient "click this, now click this" approach was sure to lead to trouble. She does seem very encouraging though, and if you're looking to self-publish your poetry, this little book would likely be helpful to you.

Balzac was an author who, apparently, drank 50 cups of coffee a day (ill health killed him early, no surprise there). He was also someone who thought it would be a good idea to write a dissection of the state of marriage in France, despite - at time of writing - not being married himself. I imagine the caffeine was what made him run to three volumes on the subject. I have them all, having downloaded them sometime in the past in a fit of, I don't know, curiosity or masochism or something.

In my defence, his prose has always been outstanding. I've read other books by him before, albeit fictional ones, and he is clever and witty and all credit to the translator here, as that comes across. There's also a very strong sense of tongue in cheek, as Balzac tries to find a way to whittle down the population of France in order to determine just how many honest women inhabit it. (If you are interested, the answer is not many, and all the peasant class is omitted by default.) So there's a strong sense of humour in there, which can be amusing but which makes a sometimes uncomfortable mix with the misogyny, and it would all be easier to swallow if the caffeine that clearly makes up about 90% of his bloodstream had allowed him to focus and whittle down, because the last third, especially, seemed to go on forever. He started ranting about boarding schools as bad places to educate girls and it all sort of fell apart from there.

You know, the prose is very accomplished. As in the first volume, the author is very witty, and he can turn a wonderful phrase, but at some point even the prettiest wrapping paper can't disguise the contempt beneath. I'd like to think this was all just an exercise in humour and irony, and that may be part of the motivation, but contempt is simmering there nonetheless.

One and a half stars rounding up to two. This is a zippy little action sci-fi book for kids, with a nice sense of humour in parts (there's a disclaimer on the packet of freeze-dried broccoli, for instance, warning consumers that it won't taste any better than the real thing. I like broccoli myself, but still: ha!). It's total wish fulfilment for kids - the 12 year old hero Kip, is employed as the youngest ever space scout, sent out to find inhabitable planets to colonise, accompanied by a fluffy, friendly wolf-human hybrid and a spaceship that's bossily intelligent in the way of older siblings everywhere.

I can see why kids might like it, but the science makes me cringe. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in a lot of scifi that you can just handwave away as being necessary for the plot, but you should at least attempt to get the rest somewhere in the ballpark of right. This is a high tech world where families go to Venus for the holidays, but Earth has one trillion residents and so that's why Kip and the rest of the scouts are off scouring the galaxy. Apparently colonising Mars won't do, as it's not enough like Earth, though one would think that with travel between the stars as easy as it is, terraforming would be a thing... not to mention birth control. Let's not even get into the fact that his ship goes at ten times light speed until it gets to a wormhole (WHY?! Just use the wormhole, don't decimate the laws of physics alongside population biology and resource management) and that he ends up running around a planet that's -210 degrees Celsius (I converted from the Fahrenheit, because apparently the future goes back to the system most working scientists don't use today) and he saves the intelligent inhabitants of that planet from dying by teaching them fire, because burning a few weeds is enough to counteract -210 degrees and reptilian biology. God.

It's irritating because, in this otherwise fun little story these problems are so easy to fix. Get rid of the ten-times-light speed, sort the temperature, lower the population and have terraforming adapt non-optimal planets and so on (there's other stuff I haven't mentioned). You can still have exploration after that, you can still search for other colony planets. Just don't teach kids crappy science while you do it!

"Octavia, why are you reading a book about raccoons?" I don't know, I just am. It's notable that after reading it, I had to check how to spell "raccoon" when writing the previous sentence, so that's not much of an argument for anything sinking in, but I enjoyed it anyway.

We don't have raccoons in New Zealand. I've never seen one in the flesh. Honestly, I just came across this book in a list of nature books and the library had it so I thought why not. And it's quite an enjoyable read, though a bit dense in places. It's sort of a monograph on raccoons, and while it's interspersed with anecdotes about raccoons the author has known, it's mostly things like their skeletal structure and life cycle and evolutionary relationships, that sort of thing. Solid and well supported science, written more for laypeople than academics, although a lot of academic work is referenced. The real strength of the piece, however, lies in the illustrations. They're black and white pen and ink drawings, but there are lots of them and they are all gorgeous. All credit to the illustrator, Janet Sharkey Thomas, she has done a fantastic job.

This was really entertaining! A children's ghost story, told from the perspective of one of the kids confronted with a ghost - a young girl with a connection to his family home, who needs to be put to rest. The plot, as you can see, is neither complicated nor original. What makes it appealing, however, is the prose, and the lovely tone that Peck uses throughout the story. It's very gently told, with extremely sympathetic main characters and a family that, if not quite so appealing, adds a humorous element. Alexander, the narrator, is a very observant child, and intersperses his ghostly communications with spying on his sister and turning a somewhat bewildered eye upon his mother's social climbing. His prickly relationship with Blossom, his neighbour and partner in crime, is also appealing, and if they were not exactly friends at the start, it's clear that they are by the end.

I would happily read this again. Apparently there's three more in the series, and I'm looking forward to discovering them too.