octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I love the idea of a nature-themed poetry collection based around a desert environment, especially as I come from a country where there's very little desert. We have a bit of volcanic aridity, but nothing like the Sahara, which is the heart of this text. There's therefore something very appealing, and very alien, about a desert environment for me, and I enjoy reading books from people who have such a close relationship with it. That being said, a lot of these poems are, I think, a little too abstract, and a little too repetitive, for my tastes. I still find them interesting, and every so often there's a line that really grabs me ("We go to the Desert in order to quench our thirst for freedom" is one of them) but on the whole I think that the photographs scattered through the text caught my attention more than the words. 

The more I read this, the more I was reminded of Charles Dickens... except this is far more lively, and far more contemporary. It's like the Artful Dodger left an orphanage behind and ran to Pointe Noire to live as part of a gang of petty thieves. There's a real undertone of humour here as well, albeit very black humour, but the most appealing thing is the voice of the protagonist. Moses is such an entertaining character, whether he's hiding hot peppers in the midnight snacks of other boys, or mourning the cat he didn't want to eat, or running errands for the local brothel keeper. He's a bit of a larrikin, is Moses, though he means well. I had hoped for a rather happier ending than he got, but then it's not an entirely unhappy ending either. It just skates along the edge of believability, a final incredulous detail in a story that gleefully wallows in its entertaining, over-the-top nature. 

This is the weirdest fucking thing! I don't know what to think of it. The story's about young girls at a boarding school, being trained in dance and physical movement in order to perform in some shady erotic play for the masses. Eventually they become adolescents and are made to leave the school and its theatre; they're basically ogled through the streets of a nearby town, and the novella ends abruptly, with no real idea of the future. The girls are completely ignorant of what's happening to them, but it must also be said that they all seem pretty happy with their weird, exploitative little lives. I'm not sure whether it's supposed to be a utopia or a dystopia, a feminist piece or a piece of fake feminism, and from the introduction it seems that this general bafflement is a fairly common reaction. 

Apparently it's a symbolist work. I have no idea what that means. That it's incomprehensible, maybe? It manages to be both interesting and off-putting at once, anyway, and is strangely compelling because of it. 

Voyager is probably my favourite Star Trek, so this collection of short stories was something I was looking forward to reading. For the most part, the stories here were enjoyable, and I liked that they covered a wide range of characters. I think my favourite was "Talent Night" by Jeffrey Lang, which was a fun comic outing and reminds me, once again, that performance is a terrible thing for those of us with irredeemable stage fright. Close runner-up was "Eighteen Minutes" by Terri Osborne, which is a diary story covering the time that the Doctor spent stranded on an inhabited planet in "Blink of an Eye." It's the story with the most emotional resonance here, and I appreciated that.

I was less interested in the framing story, which seemed frankly unnecessary, and I have to admit that I didn't much care for the two (two! why did we need two?!) stories about how the Equinox survivors had sad, sad difficulties fitting in with the rest of the crew, and how their atonement Taught Lessons to major characters. Call me unforgiving, but I don't give a shit about genocidal murderers and their atonement, and any time I come across narratives like these it really irritates me how the authors skim over the sheer unremitting awfulness of what these characters did in favour of giving them a more sympathetic presentation. I get that in a more enlightened time criminals can't just be spaced, and I don't support capital punishment anyway, but I'd rather see this topic explored, if it has to be, with considerably more gumption than these rather obvious attempts exhibit. 

This was not at all what I expected! As a teenager, Tomura hears a piano tuner working on an instrument at his school, and the sound transports him to a forest landscape - metaphorically, not literally. The sound gives him a strong sense-memory of the mountain forests of his home, and I picked it up off the library shelf thinking that it sounded like it might be a magical realist exploration of landscape and music. It wasn't. That speculative, dreamy element isn't really there at all. Instead, Tomura becomes a piano tuner himself, and learns to see the beauty in all types of pianos, and all types of piano players.

It's a very gentle, kindhearted read, and apparently a bestseller in Japan, where it's set. I do find it a little slow, and perhaps a little too contemplative for my tastes, but it was still an enjoyable read. I just can't shake the feeling that I'd rather it was the book I thought, rather than the book that it is. Which is an absolute failing on my part, and one that's completely counter to the lovely message of the story as a whole. Tomura would no doubt shake his head at me, and he'd probably be right to. 

I have long been a fan of Wangari Maathai and the astonishing work she has done with Kenya's Green Belt Movement. More Nobel peace prizes should be given out for this sort of thing - it seems plainly obvious to me that ensuring people have more sustainable sources of food and energy results in less conflict overall.

This book is an overview of the first years of the GBM - what Maathai calls Phase I. It's more a how-to policy book than a narrative, and I think what stands out most here is the emphasis on community involvement, how necessary it is, and how difficult it can be. The words "persistence" and "patience" come up over and over, but while there's often a sense of frustration here (particularly directed at unhelpful governments) there's also a strong sense of optimism: the certainty that BGM could work, and that people would respond to it eventually. Both these things proved true, of course. I'd be interested to read a follow-up volume, because this only really covers the period up to 1999 and that was nearly quarter of a century ago. I grabbed Maathai's autobiography from the library along with this, though, so maybe more information will be there. 

This is both compelling and horribly depressing. The endless miserable grind of starvation and murder under the Khmer Rouge is bad enough, but the narrator here lived through it as a young child. Loung Ung was five when she and her parents and six siblings fled their middle-class urban life in order to hide in the countryside, living as peasants in order to escape the prospect of capture and death. As a family, they are only intermittently successful. Both parents and two siblings die horrible deaths, although Ung can only really verify the details of one. The other deaths she imagines, over and over, and it seems the narrative she's settled on (half imagination, half nightmare drawn from life) might almost be, in a hideous sort of way, a comfort. Hard as it is to encompass, maybe knowing what happened to them, even if it's a knowledge built up brick by manufactured brick, is preferable to a lifetime of constant wondering.

The book describes Ung's life from five to eight years old, and if those years are horrifically memorable, they are also surprisingly detailed. Either her memory is astonishing, or (more likely, perhaps) it's very good, but also propped up by the collective memories of her surviving siblings and family members, each of them reinforcing the others over the years. If so, I quite like the thought. Ung was the youngest survivor of her family, after all, and the idea that the familial destruction was not so complete is one of the few hopeful strands in here. 

I don't know if I <i>like</i> these short little poems, exactly, but I find them <i>interesting</i>, which is just as important. Reliably, I enjoy the first 80% or so of each poem, because the images are striking and quirky and sensual, and then the final lines hare off in another direction entirely, one that seems barely related, and I'm left an odd mixture of baffled and deflated. They're weirdly compelling, though, and I'm left wanting to go read more by the author to see if she can produce, in another book, the same strange effect.  

Sometimes, I just want to say, about a book, "this is really awful," because there's not much else that can be said beyond that terrible, salient fact. Daoud Hari and his family lived in Darfur before the genocide began, and while many young men of his age joined one or other of the armed resistances, Hari's ability to speak English, Arabic, and Zaghawa meant that his skills put him in demand as a translator. First, he translated for the genocide investigators, as they interviewed over a thousand victims of the atrocities in Darfur, and then he translated for journalists in that region - something that put him in severe danger. Hari is a little cavalier about that danger, but it's clear that he - along with so many of the fighters - consider themselves practically dead anyway, and are just waiting for the act of their murder to catch up with the prospect of it.

This is a bitter, tragic approach, but surrounded by loss and brutality it's hard not to sympathise - some of the stories that he recounts, from the victims of that genocide, are absolutely horrific. I will say that he takes care not to overwhelm the reader with endless hideous examples, but there are enough here that we can imagine the sheer unbearable weight of the rest. What makes it more compelling is the tone and voice of the piece - I hesitate to call it chatty, exactly, but it's friendly and informal. Confiding, almost, as if he's reaching out to a friend; the fact that he's so easy to read and relate to almost makes it worse - there's no escaping the horror through a veneer of academic or organisational distance, for example. I have to admit that there were times I would have liked a little more depth as to what was going on - the first appendix, especially, was helpful in that regard - but that doesn't take away from the fact that this is a very affecting memoir. 

This has such an amazing cover, all credit to the artist here because John Jennings has done a fantastic job. So much of Parable is misery and flame that in my head, at least, the palette of this story has always been ashy. Art-wise, there's more colour here than I expected, but it's still quite muted; the cover's an outlier in that regard.

Assessing adaptations is always interesting. I remember reading the novel a while back, and it (like much of Butler's work) was a five star read for me. Her prose is just so good, and I wonder now if this graphic novel adaptation loses a star for me because so much of that prose isn't there. Maybe knowing the story has lessened the surprise of it, or maybe it was because the inclusion of the Earthseed writings felt a little less organic in this form. This is a substantial adaptation, running to over two hundred pages, but even so the format means there's just less space for words. It's been a while since I've read the novel, so I could be misremembering, but it feels as if the ratio between the religious elements and the rest of the text isn't quite the same. Given how perfectly the original worked for me, any deviation is likely to be something I find a little less appealing. That being said, the strength of Butler's vision still shines through here, and it's a reminder to go read Talents... because I haven't yet, and I've been meaning to.