octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I mean, I still liked it, but it feels like an issue of filler. I have no interest in jealous squabbles over ex-girlfriends or brothel visits, and neither of them seemed to advance the plot any.

The lying cat is still the best character. 

I love the lying cat. My sister has two that look exactly like it: same hideous breed, but much smaller. They are profoundly stupid. (One of them had an enormous vet bill after it stole duck prosciutto wrapped in muslin off the bench, unwrapped the duck, and ate the muslin. Yeah.)

Every time I see the lying cat, I cackle. 

Sis, are your cats worth it? Yes? LYING. For what you spent untangling that cat's guts, you could have gone to Fiji. 

Oh, this is more like it! Much more interesting than the first issue - the Stalk is weird and creepy, and I love the seahorse agent. Actually, the whole thing is appealingly weird. It helps that most of the setting for this one is a sort of horrifying enchanted forest, which will always be a favourite setting for me. The art really sells that part of it, too, so Fiona Staples is doing a fantastic job there. 

I have to admit, I've heard of Saga quite a bit, but never in detail. It takes up a chunk of space on the library's graphic novel shelves, so I thought I'd give it a go. I liked it - and I like that the first issue is a double-sized chunk; it makes it easier to get into.

I'm interested in the central pair and their kid, but rather less enamoured with the rest of it. Especially those robot things with the tv heads that showed up in a very unsatisfactory sex scene! They leave me confused and bored. I get that a lot of this is set-up, but I can tell you right now that - Romeo and Juliet or not - there's nothing compelling about that universal war. As I said: I do like the family, though. 

I read Angelou's Caged Bird some time back and thought it was outstanding, so when I discovered this in my local library - another memoir, though much different in focus - I knew I wanted to read it. It's very strongly focused on Angelou's relationship with her mother Vivian Baxter; how Angelou returned to her care after spending most of her childhood being looked after by her grandmother, and how their relationship changed over the decades. As Angelou points out, at the end of the book, Baxter was a "terrible" mother of small children, but an excellent mother of young adults. 

And honestly... some ages are just easier than others. I say that never having been a parent, but the reason I've never been a parent is that I really don't think I could tolerate toddlers all that well. Being trapped with them for years at a time sounds like absolute hell - even if those years are necessary and soon over. Older kids are much more tolerable. So I did feel a lot of sympathy for Baxter there, but then she is an immensely sympathetic person. Charismatic, kind, generous... she clearly loves her daughter very much indeed, and proves to be a tremendous support to her. It makes for a very warm and positive read. 

There's something quite terrifying about the central challenge here, which is Durand's tumour-induced epilepsy. There she is, going about her life and everything's normal, or it seems that way... except her brain periodically cuts out, and when she zaps back to full consciousness she doesn't even remember the lapse. The people around her certainly do, though - and it must be shockingly destabilising, being constantly told, by people you trust, that there's a problem with your mind and, by that problem's very nature, you can't even notice it, or not really.

It's like the beginning of a horror story, really it is.

In this case, it's a horror story with an (eventual) happy ending, as medical advances and an exceptionally supportive family lead to full recovery, but even so. I defy anyone to read this and not wonder, for a split second, if that time earlier in the day when they zoned out over some small boring thing wasn't indicative of a bigger problem. Hypochondria, certainly! Doesn't make the prospect of something like this any less dreadful, though. 

This is a collection of ghost stories, loosely connected by a framing investigator. All the stories are set in real places, or very close approximations thereof, and there's an awful, terrifying sort of melancholy about them. They're good short stories, they are, but when I think of this collection - and I started reading it a couple of years back and never quite finished, for reasons which are about to be apparent - there's one story in particular that I think of. The others, as I said, are good, but "Beyond St. Patrick's Chapel"...?

That story gives me the creeps. It really does. A couple of years back, and I was reading this book one night, and came across this story and noped out of it. Well, not exactly. I finished the story, shut the book with thoughts of possibly never sleeping again, and never picked it back up. Well I've read and re-read it all now, and that "Chapel" story is still horrific. It's not even about a chapel. A guy walks past the chapel, onto the nearby headland, and this invisible pack of something starts to silently track him through the grass. That's it. It's not complicated. It's not high concept. It's just plain terrifying.

What a fantastic story. 

This is phenomenally well researched - a history of Ngāti Kahu come out of oral histories and written records. Much of it is infuriating, chronicling as it does the truly brazen theft of the lands at the centre of the relevant Waitangi claims. Even living in New Zealand as I do - and therefore as someone who should have at least a passing familiarity with the subject - I was shocked. It's clear how much I do not know.

Much of this was valuable reading for me in that respect. Much of it was valuable reading... but not for me. This book was written for the benefit of Ngāti Kahu and is naturally oriented towards them. I have to admit I could not get very interested in the long swathes of genealogy included here (I'm not that interested in my own genealogy, let alone anyone else's!) but I'm not the target audience for that, so my disinterest shouldn't speak to the value of the work. 

On a technical level, I do wonder about the tables. There are many of them, and they are lengthy and repetitive. I wonder if there could have been a more effective way of ordering that information so the same data wasn't repeated so very many times, but that is, as I said, a technical quibble.

Worth reading, and in places fascinating, but as I said: in places not for me. And that's fine. Not everything is or should be. 

I've been meaning to read this for years now, and it's finally reached the top of the to-read pile. It's got a fantastic, sardonic tone, and I don't know what inspired the story, but I like to think of that little rover on Mars, and how it sings birthday songs and has a whole lot of people emotionally invested in it. 

On a technical level, one of the things that I noted and admired here was a great way of dealing with handwavium. Any time the story approaches something scientific - such as how emergency beacons interact with wormholes - Murderbot is all "I haven't downloaded this information and so I don't know. Also, I don't care." As a reader who often finds extraneous and overly technical worldbuilding to be somewhat tedious, a great big fat hooray to that. We don't need it, and I don't care either. I want emotion, and - horrified as it may be to hear it - Murderbot doesn't skimp on that. 

It's been a while since I've read one of these, and I'm remembering why. I just can't seem to get into it... and given that I'm the type of person who feels like they have to finish a series when they start it... oh well.

I don't know why I find it so hard to connect with. Mostly when I read these I end up feeling confused, and then I feel old, ha! I've read and loved other manga, so why I keep bouncing off this one I don't know. I think it could be the pacing? It always strikes me as quite frenetic. I look at the characters and want to feed them tranquilizers. Everything's such a drama.

Yes, I know. Get off my lawn.