octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I don't know why his unjust conviction is making me feel more fondly for Aubrey, but it does. Usually he is the character I sit through to get to more of Maturin, but he comes off particularly well in his refusal to consider a pardon, on the grounds that it implies he did wrong in the first place. Which of course he did, but it was wrong on a minor scale - falling for a scam like a duffer - and not actual fraud, which he was punished for and did not deserve. His constant turning of failure into increasingly unbelievable riches induces ever more eye-rolling from me, however, and in this I have to admit Maturin is no better, inheriting incredible wealth from a dead relative as he has. 

Still. I am entertained by the plot, and especially by O'Brian's habit, in this volume, of cutting short action in favour of aftermath... given the action tends towards sea battles, I am not terribly sorry to miss it. I was very pleased, too, to see the return of Maturin's wife Diana, who is an excellent foil for her husband. Looking forward to the next book, where no doubt she'll pay a much larger role. 

I have to admit that the Appalachian Trail is something I find both tempting and fascinating... even though I haven't done any real tramping for years, and even though I am horrified by the thought of bears and snakes and so forth, animals that aren't found in any New Zealand bush. BEARS, for god's sake. They're hungry. I could tide them through winter. 

Unlike me, however, Emma Gatewood (now dead, then in her late sixties) did not think everything to death, although she was sensibly afraid of bears. Instead she decided, with little equipment - not even a sleeping bag or proper shoes! - to leave her family behind and go for a walk. On her own terms, which seems like one of the very few times that desire applied, given her horrendously violent husband. (I'm so glad this book memorialises him as the monster he was.) Against all odds she succeeds and then, instead of having a nice rest, Grandma Gatewood heads off to do the Trail twice more, which even my idealistic, dreaming self considers to be excessive. The woman clearly loved walking. The book reminds me why I used to as well. It might, I think, be time to start up again. 

After all, there's no bears on Te Araroa... 

This book was very briefly banned in New Zealand a few years back - God only knows why, unless it's the depiction of teenagers acting like teenagers - but the whole affair was so ridiculous that I promised myself I'd read it one day to see what the fuss was about. Sanity prevailed, and book was quickly back in public libraries, which is where I borrowed this copy from. I liked it. I did think it was rather disjointed and could have been a more coherent whole, and I felt the ending was depressingly predictable. That school... talk about slapping down students who were different. 

But yeah. Not worth banning. I was a little bit disappointed, to be honest, that it wasn't deservedly scandalous! I was all prepared to clutch my pearls and everything. 

Some books are both hopeful and absolutely depressing at once, and this is one of them. It's a short piece, almost novella-length I think, and I understand that in later autobiographies Douglass goes deeper into the story of his life. (He's an excellent writer, so they're going on my list of things to read.)

In his story of escape from slavery, however, I think what struck me most was the claim - put forward first in the introduction - that Douglass lived in one of the more moderate(!) slave-owning states, and thus escaped the full horror of what life as a slave could be deeper in the American South, for instance. Frankly, his life seemed horrible enough to me already, and if he didn't suffer quite as much as some of the fellow slaves whose lives he described, it is certainly far more than any human being should have to live through. Also notable was his scathing assessment of the religious lives of the slave-holders, whose hypocrisy on how they behaved towards their fellow man, and how they claimed one should behave, was both painfully evident and repugnant.

The introduction also made much of the fact that Douglass used the real names of the people who abused him. I hope they read this book and it pricked their conscience, although one wonders whether or not they had any to begin with. I honestly doubt it. 

This short collection of speeches on climate change by Greta Thunberg is something I wanted to like a lot more than I did. Don't get me wrong: I agree with what she's saying. She's absolutely correct... but I'm not reviewing a speech here, or a sympathetic perspective. I'm reviewing a book, and this one is highly repetitive. In one sense it needs to be. The content of these speeches isn't widely known, or at least not as widely known as it should be, and if giving the same speech over and over again helps to hammer in that content and make the general public aware of it, then that's what needs to happen. But it is the same speech. The wording changes, as you read through them, but not that much. The book is essentially copies of the same speech. 

As a speech, it's necessary. As a book, it's constant duplication. I still liked it, but it certainly didn't need to be longer. 

I read and reviewed each of the three novellas collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The collection rating was easy, as all the individual stories got three stars from me. They're a little slight, but they're also fun and fast-paced, and I can appreciate that. I can also appreciate how stories like these must spark kids' interest in mythologies, and help them to become aware of how those mythologies exist as continually changing narratives. The particular change featured here is that which occurs when two different world-explanation-systems meet and adapt to each other. That's something that still goes on today, and in many forms, so it's great that kids who read this series are introduced to the idea in a kind of low-stakes way, if that makes sense. Hopefully it'll help them to recognise systemic conflicts and changes when they come across them in real life, and be a little more open as to what those things can mean.

The concluding story to this little crossover series, and it's much the same as the other two: a fun (often funny) and fast-paced romp that mashes up Greek and Egyptian mythology. I particularly like the reappearance of the doomed attack camel, which falls on enemies from a height and farts at them. There's just something so ungainly about camels, which is likely a very unfair assessment, but even so. The image of a bewildered camel, collapsed on top of a person, entertains me every time. 

You would think that I'd have a greater reaction to the rest of the story than I do to the tiny portion of it with the camel, but I really don't. I find the camel hilarious. 

Quick, fun little novella in which Sadie and Annabeth team up to take down a three-headed monster and a resurrected god. It's fast-paced and adventurous, and the girls work together well although their success ultimately rests on that constant failure of the incompetent antagonist: the need to explain their evil plans to the heroes instead of just smiting them. To their credit, the girls provoke this explanation in order to buy time, which makes me think that Serapis was never that bright to begin with. You'd think a god would recognise a tactic like that, but maybe all those millennia of... non-existence? godly hibernation? ... has dulled divine intelligence. 

As I understand it, this is a collection of individual comics, and it reads very much like a graphic short story collection. Set in the small community of Palomar, these comics follow an enormous cast of characters over time, and the individual stories, being all set in the same time and space, are interconnected through plot and character. It's very effectively done, but I admit I would have liked a cheat sheet at the beginning, to help keep track of who everyone is and how they're related.

I've read a couple of the other Love and Rockets anthologies, and I think this is my favourite so far. I like the variety of stories, and the emphasis on diverse characters. Luba, especially, stands out. In any number of comics and other media, a character with her figure would struggle to be more than one-note, or would descend into a joke. There's a real character that exists alongside her sex appeal, however, and her relationships with friends and family, as well as her business ambitions, make her feel like a person instead of a caricature. I say that even though there's something of caricature about the whole book, an amused tongue-in-cheek look at small-town life, and the squabbles and alliances that form in kitchens and bedrooms and with the kids playing in the street.

I don't know that I love it, exactly, but I do find it interesting, and that's good enough. 

This is a dystopian scifi piece that in many ways feels barely science fiction at all. It's set in a world of environmental collapse, but for pretty much the entirety of the book there's no real indication that this is affecting anyone's life in any measurable way. The absence of plants and animals, for instance, has no apparent consequence on food supply, and the characters eat and drink and drug their way through the end of days with what honestly seems like limited engagement with reality. The first half of the book, especially, comes across much more as a story of a young queer woman engaging with drugs, alcohol, and sex on a near constant basis. I enjoyed reading it for the prose - which slides down very easily, but the characters and story didn't strike me as anything particularly special.

Then, halfway through the book, Michelle leaves San Francisco for Los Angeles, and the novel shifts into another gear. The apocalypse has arrived, and everyone has a relatively short time to live. There's no magic escape: death is coming on a vast scale, and mass suicides become the norm. Michelle's response to all this is calmer than might be expected from her SF dramatics. She goes about her menial job in a bookstore, in some ways coping much better than everyone around her, even when she starts sharing dreams with strangers. It's almost as if this overarching apocalypse is background noise to her attempts to get off the booze and write a book, and there's something so original about that presentation of disaster, something just plain interesting. That presentation, combined with the prose, meant that I read this in a single sitting. I didn't mean to - there's actual work I should be doing! - but, frankly, I just didn't want to stop.