octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This was absolutely riveting, and it's not often I say that about a philosophy book. A lot of that essential appeal is due to the subject matter, because the prospect of resurrecting mammoths, for example, is just deeply compelling, but a lot of it is because it's just plain lucid. Coming from a science communication background as I do, I've often thought that philosophers could use the same crash course in communication that more and more scientists are getting, because the majority of philosophy texts that I've read (and there have not been that many) are clear as mud and apparently happy to be so.

This, on the other hand, has made clarity and general accessibility a clear priority, and I really appreciate it. I have to admit, when it gets down to reporting arguments along the lines of "is a resurrected mammoth really a mammoth, or is it a fake mammoth because it will not have the same gut flora as real mammoths?" (I paraphrase) I start to feel this is taking things a bit too far... even having written about microbiomes and identity myself (albeit in terms of speculative fiction). Campbell and Whittle are reporting these arguments, however, and assessing them for logical underpinnings, not putting them forward themselves, so I feel no need to clutch at their collars and exclaim, in rising tones, "Who cares about gut flora! It's a mammoth! Don't you want to see a mammoth?!"

Reader, I don't care if the resurrected mammoth is a real mammoth or not. I'd still give up a kidney to have them back. Because they're fascinating, and so is this book. 

I could not get on with this, I really couldn't - just bounced off it entirely. A short way through it, I was reminded of Edith Sitwell's poetry, so imagine my surprise when she was name-dropped a few poems later. I like Sitwell much more, though - at least the bits of her that I've read: one of my early academic papers was on her Three Poems of the Atomic Age, which looked at the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through Sitwell's own religious lens. The poems sort of mixed the events of the bombings with apocalyptic mythology, and they were really effective... but I think they were so effective because Sitwell limited her comparison to that very strong central metaphor.

Duncan, on the other hand... it's like a grab-bag of references from half a dozen ancient civilizations mixed with contemporary culture and a very mannered approach to the act of creating literature. There's an interminable series of poems, scattered throughout the book, called "The Structure of Rime," and they - like so many of the other poems here - are just unbearably pretentious. Consider this:

I'm sorry, but 90+ pages of this is too much for me to retain any sort of liking for it. There's the very odd interesting image or wordplay, but the (admittedly delightful) single verse about the "forlorn moosey-faced poem" is not enough to save this collection for me. I've read it once, and never again.

 

This is an interesting and mostly far-more-readable-than-the-norm academic collection on women film-makers and how they approach horror. I'm a horror writer myself, which developed out of being a horror fan, but I'm not a film-maker, so I find it appealing to see how other women with the same horror interests use a visual medium to tell their own horror stories, instead of a purely written one.

There's rather more practical than theory here, although the latter does exist - the various papers tend to be latched on very heavily to one or more examples, which is useful (and which, helpfully, adds to my to-watch list). There's also a tempting variety of papers from various academics, and while I enjoyed nearly all of them, I think my favourite chapters were the ones on Korean cinema, the subverted gaze in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and the uncanny in the French eco-horror film Évolution - I actually have a paper coming out on that last film myself soon, and mine is nothing like Loreck's take on it, so that was really fascinating to read. We've taken completely opposite approaches - Loreck's looking at Évolution through the lens of the uncanny, while I'm looking at it through the lens of the intertidal zone.

Well worth reading for film-makers, I think, and quite interesting for the rest of us too. 

This is one of those random books I pick up in order to try reading new things and all that. I did not expect to be as riveted as I was. I don't read many sports books, and I have less than no interest in soccer, so you understand I wasn't going into this with high hopes, but it was fascinating. Buford wanted to learn about the phenomenon of English soccer thugs, the fans that use sport as an excuse for violence, theft, and general mayhem (including, at one point, actual cannibalism - that story about the eye? Disgusting). All the people profiled in this are pretty wretched, actually, but the interesting thing is how years spent in their company begins to alter the author himself. There's a lot here about the psychology of crowds, of how being part of a mob encourages people to act in ways they may not normally, and Buford describes how he too gets caught up in the emotion of the riots, although admittedly he has the self-control to mostly keep hold of himself and act more as observer than participant.

I have to say, as the reporting of these dismal losers goes on and on, I feel even less interest in soccer than before... but I did feel a sustained interest in why these vicious, awful people weren't just plain shot. By the end, when they were rioting in Sardinia, I was actively hoping for them to be mown down by the Italian army. Which is tribalism of another kind, I realise - the desire to inflict suffering on deserving targets - and believe me, I see the parallels. Which is not exactly comfortable reading, but then it shouldn't be. 

 

I like that this quick children's tie-in novel is strongly centred in the Star Trek ethos - that alien species are beings that can be communicated with and worked with, and that no matter how threatening they may initially seem, common ground can be found. The execution, on the other hand, is a little baffling. On his way to join the Academy, Data and a handful of other would-be cadets are faced with a situation that they have to handle alone, after the disappearance of all the ship's officers. And it's basically likeable, I suppose, but it's hard to get around the fact that none of these other young people do anything. Every action, every suggestion... everything comes from Data, and so I'm left wondering what was the point of having them there? Honestly, if the other cadets had disappeared along with the rest of the crew, nothing functionally would have changed with regard to the plot. And that just seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity, really. 

I have to admit that when I first saw the title of this book, I thought it would be about visual art; instead, it's an argument that Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be interpreted as art. Which doesn't seem such a stretch to me, but then some people are snobby about what they call art, and as Wilcox points out, even the best episodes of the show got little critical attention for their writing or acting in the form of awards, or award nominations, from mainstream outlets such as the Emmys.

The book's structured in two parts, and while both are interesting, I found the second half - comprising close reads of half a dozen episodes as case studies - to be more appealing. Primarily because most of the episodes chosen, such as "The Body" or "Once More with Feeling" are also favourites of mine (though for the life of me I can't remember a single thing about "The Zeppo"). Anyway, it's an enjoyable and generally accessible read; there was never a point where my attention faded out. I suspect that's at least in part because I'm a big fan of the show, but Wilcox also takes care not to wallow overly in academic-speak, which is frankly always helpful. 

Mildly interesting autobiographical account of a Tuvalu man, and his eventual involvement in the purchase of an uninhabited Fijian island, subsequently colonised by a number of immigrants from Tuvalu. It's quite short, and I'm not sure that the editing has done it any favours. Much of the autobiographical content, which makes up the bulk of the work, has been taken down from oral records by the editor, who has also contributed a short essay at the end of the book. There are some endnotes, but I tend to think that these could have been more extensive; as it is, this feels as if it's all a bit bare-boned - as if the editor's directing this book at an already quite well-informed audience. Not being so knowledgeable, I'd have liked to have a broader cultural and political context to get a clearer picture, as it were. 

I think that sometimes you read a book, and you can appreciate the effort, the organisation, and the intent behind it, and still just not find it that interesting. I did not find this that interesting. It wasn't awful. It was better than the first book in the series. I just... I don't care about alternate universes, or alternate timelines, or convoluted plots that are more interested in moving parts than in characters. So many people died in this, in so many supposedly thrilling death scenes, but the overall emotional effect wasn't there for me. I was overdosed on drama, and by the end I did not care. My overwhelming feeling, on reading the final lines, was "This book is about 150 pages too long."

The trilogy's a giant reset button for the Star Trek universe. I get it, I do. But there are Trek books that I will read again, primarily for their character work. This book - this series - I won't be reading it again. Once is enough. 

This is very black-humoured, and I could see the twist as to the obituaries a mile off, but the penguin is so entertaining that I just don't care. Viktor, a not especially successful writer, is engaged to produce obituaries for people who aren't yet dead. He also has a penguin - an emperor penguin, no less, called Misha, obtained from the zoo in Kyiv after they could no longer afford to feed him. A journalist's small apartment is no place for a metre tall penguin, and Eastern Europe is just too hot anyway. Misha is, naturally, depressed. It shouldn't be funny but it is... and the penguin, it seems, is one of the few lines of defence between Viktor and the local Mafia.

It's ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous, but it is satire, and it's enormously entertaining. I don't think the end was quite as strong as the rest of it, perhaps, but I've just found out that there's a sequel, so fingers crossed that Viktor and Misha are reunited for more frozen fish and political disaster. 

This comes across as absolutely chaotic, but in a really interesting way. I like the structure of it, too - each part is told from multiple points of view, from a variety of different characters. This is pretty common in a lot of the books that I read, but it's more often that the multiple perspectives have a different chapter each, for instance. Here the characters' points of view last anything from a couple of paragraphs to several pages. It's a really interesting technique, and I think it's one that I'd like to try on one of my own upcoming projects.

I admit that the story's pretty grim. Those multiple characters include scorned lovers and criminals and ghosts, even, as relationships change and fall apart. There's a serial killer, there's a pair of brothers who murder their own dad. And in the middle of it all, there's the black cathedral, being built by the community in a vast expression of religious outpouring, which is all well and good except it seems that the cathedral is cursed. Evil, even. That's what tips this over into magical realism for me, even more than the ghosts and the small expressions of magic. The cathedral's being built in an area of extreme deprivation, of extreme social dysfunction, and it's easy to imagine that all the things that are happening around it - the murders, the abusive relationships - are a result of that dysfunction. It's a plausible explanation... but it's always undercut by that looming, unfinished monstrosity, that both attracts and repels people at once and puts the untrustworthy at the centre of the narrative.