octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

The death I was expecting did not eventuate. I suppose it was foolish to expect it, given Logan's current stance on nonviolence, but for a moment there I thought the death of that particular character (you see how I'm avoiding spoilers) would have something interesting to say about our expectations for family and new generations within a dystopian, wasteland environment such as this is. That said, this issue, while fun, is mostly filler, what with car chases and mole creatures and such. 

There's more dinosaurs, though, and I choose to believe that those of them that were involved in the car chase survived the mole creatures and are just wandering around the plains, feeding on unpleasant people until they're fat, happy animals, because someone in this series should be. 

Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of our own absent parenting coming home to roost. If this series were as grim as it's making out to be, the next issue (this one ends on a cliffhanger) will have a very specific death, so I'm interested to see if that will pan out. There's already a few deaths in here - gruesome ones. I do like the one involving dinosaurs, which in some ways makes me no different from the spectators I suppose. If I'm supposed to know the victims past a very dim recollection of certain movies I don't, so that may have something to do with my reaction, but honestly. Dinosaurs have to eat too. 

I'm still enjoying the series, but it does begin to feel like a vehicle for nihilism and gore. I can enjoy nihilism and gore, but the presentation in this particular issue gets more points for style than substance, I think. 

Logan and Hawkeye are off on a road trip, essentially, driving through post-apocalyptic America. I can't say that I'm remotely interested in Hawkeye or his family, nor do I care much about the whole Ghost Rider thing, because this is really nothing new. Apocalyptic gangs in apocalyptic landscapes... it's been done to death and is frankly not all that exciting. What I was interested in was the bitterly awful town of Hammer Falls, which has turned itself into an almost religious memorial for dead superheroes. It's kitsch and exploitative and desperate, and the Thor's hammer panel was genuinely affecting. This is the sort of weird shit I'm here for; it's much more compelling than the rest. 

I haven't seen the film, though I did see some of the earlier X-Men movies, and I can't say that I've read any of the comics before, so I basically picked this up at random because I came across it at the library. It was really good - a very small story that nonetheless sets up a wider world very well indeed. When it comes to superheroes, I much prefer the small stories over the giant set-piece battles, so this is aimed directly at readers like me. Whether it stays that way is another thing, but this muted, much older Logan is genuinely compelling. I don't know that I'm entirely interested in the back story that sets all this up - the widespread death and loss of the superheroes, and the subsequent rise of the villains - but I am interested in seeing the consequences of this play out a generation or two later, as this seems to be doing. Excited to read the next in the series! 

This book is primarily a photographic history. I don't want to call it a coffee table book, because the history that it documents is crucially important to my country, and my feeling is that a coffee table book is primarily decorative. That being said, the ratio of photographs to text here is in line with what you might expect from a coffee table book, so the comparison does hold some (limited) water. There's a lot of photos here, is what I'm saying... and they're fascinating.

Harris' text is also very interesting. She's trying to summarise forty years of protest, from different parties and with different goals, over a wide range of issues, so that text is not as in-depth as you would expect from a more typical history. As I read through it I kept thinking that I wanted more text, more explanation and history, but that is an unfair expectation given the format of the book. Honestly, she's balanced word and image extremely well here, and interested readers such as myself can always go find other books for more information. It would have been interesting to have small excerpts and memories of the various protests from the subjects of some of these photos, but again, that might have been beyond the scope of this project. Nonetheless, it's a very compelling record, being both informative and sympathetic - and it's got me interested in learning more NZ history, so that's something. 

I have very few books shelved under "law," and I think most of them are memoirs! I'm sorry, but with the best will in the world I find a lot of legal writing to be very dry - albeit very important - so having it featured in memoirs is like a pill in jam... I can learn about it and appreciate the more consumable coating at the same time.

That coating, here, is a chatty and thoughtful memoir from a deafblind woman who attends Harvard Law School and ends up working as a disability advocate. I read Helen Keller's autobiography last year, I think, and the difference between the two books is profound, and a real argument for the improvements that technology can make in a person's life. The technical set-up described here, where a person can type into a wireless keyboard and have their words pop up in Braille on Haben's screen, is fascinating. What a great way to increase communication and accessibility! I'm strongly tempted to go to YouTube and see if there's a video that shows me how it works... which is getting a little off-track for a review, but there you go, I was interested. I think I was more interested in that than Maxine the guide dog, and considering how much I like animals that is saying something.

Anyway, back to the book: it's a very tightly focused account of living with disability, including the challenges and ways of perceiving the world that result. It's particularly accessible in the way that it talks about this; on the other hand the prose is competent but not terribly lyrical - which is why I'm giving it three and a half stars, rather than four. Still genuinely worth reading, though! 

I zipped through this little book in about an hour and a half. It's very nicely paced, so that helped, containing as it does the novelisations-in-short-story-form of six episodes from the original series of Star Trek. The best of them was, I think, "The Menagerie," the initial pilot episode that was so thoroughly reworked for the show proper. I've seen it several times, so no surprises there, but what was most interesting was how Blish altered the episode slightly, getting rid of the framing device. Most of the episodes in this series are straight retellings with little authorial editing or explanation, but Blish had apparently tried and failed to produce such a retelling, and felt exercised enough by the final product that he left a rather lengthy note explaining what he'd done. I always enjoy reading that sort of thing - being a writer myself I feel a sympathy! - and it's good to see how other writers deal with problems like this when things don't turn out as expected. 

I've read and reviewed the two books collected here separately, so this is basically for my own records. Notable to this edition is the very interesting introduction, which places the writing of the two books in a period where Twain's own ethical development was coming to more fully understand the influence of slavery on American life. When I read Tom Sawyer, a little while back, I commented that the whole book had a predominant flavour of nostalgia. Given that much of it is drawn from Twain's own childhood experiences in Missouri, that's understandable - but that preoccupation with childish things led to a book that glossed over the reality of slavery at the time, and how it existed in Tom's life (and by extension, child-Twain's). Ten years later, and married to a woman from a family of abolitionists, Twain, so the introduction argues, regretted that glossing over as a product of his own ignorance, and actively tried to create a novel in which slavery was more thoroughly interrogated. It was a clear, well-argued introduction, and I'm glad I read it - it's provided a lot of context to the books that I didn't have before.

The rating for the collection is, as always, the average of the individual ratings. 

I have finally, finally got around to reading this. I know it's a classic, and somehow I've never picked it up before. All I knew about it was that it had Huckleberry floating down the Mississippi on a raft, and with the best will in that world that did not seem terribly compelling when I could be reading scifi. Nonetheless, most classics are classics for a reason (although not you, War and Peace), and this was well worth reading. 

The language was especially interesting, and by that I don't mean the very frequent use of a particular slur, which presumably was common use at the time. (I lie, I did know something else about the book, having heard, vaguely, of a controversy about the editing of such in some editions. The copy I got came from Project Gutenberg, so no editing there.) No, when I say the language was interesting I meant that it's told in vernacular. I'm not American, so I'm just trusting that Twain's got it right - and he was raised in the same region, I think, so he'd know. There were a few places I had to puzzle it out, but it does give the book a very strong sense of voice. I did think the story dragged on a bit towards the end, with Jim's rescue descending into utter farce, but I can hardly fault child characters for behaving childishly, and it all turned out well. I do think, however, that my favourite bits of it were the simple passages where Huck and Jim were floating down the river - these had a real sense of place. I was less interested in the people they met along the way, but it was worth reading for the geography. 

I really admire the worldbuilding in these novellas; I just wish I got on as well with the characters. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed this book, and I enjoyed it more than the first one in the series. I find Mokoya's grief compelling, terrible as that sounds, and I was pleased to see her begin to dig herself out of it.

I was not pleased - although I was distinctly unsurprised - that a town in this world has been razed to the ground by the Protectorate, along with everyone in it. Akeha's refusal to stop his horrible mother in the last book has led directly to this massacre, and honestly, he bears some responsibility for it. Not that this is explored at all, and fairness where it's due, Red Threads sticks the landing a little more than its predecessor. Not quite, however, at least for me, because the same issue is arising again. A spoilt, shortsighted princess Frankensteins the soul of her dying mother onto a naga, which promptly starts destroying another town. There's people dead in the streets, but the princess is so relieved when she finds that Mokoya has survived a previous encounter with her. "I'm not a criminal!" she cries, in absolute relief, to which I say a great fat fuck off, madam, people are dead because of your choices. Yes, the princess is young and grieving terribly, and yes, she had a lot of help and she wasn't really the primary mover, but she has a responsibility for the consequences of her actions, and again... it's crickets there, I'm afraid. I think there's a solid moral philosophy underlining these narrative choices, but as with the last book I have little sympathy for it. That, I think, is colouring my response to what is really a very finely written body of work.