octavia_cade's reviews
2611 reviews

I don't often read sports stories but this one was alright. Jim Wellington goes to college and gets into athletics - poor bastard - and he's easy to sympathise with because he's just a decent person, even if he does enjoy spending his free time running in circles. It's very much a coming of age story, but while I enjoyed the sports stuff (which was surprising!) and his friendship with the footballer McGuire, I was less interested in the rest of the social life of the school, including pranks and student mobs doing dickhead things and behaving like entitled cretins. 

There's nothing surprising here; the story hits pretty much every beat you would expect from something like this, but Wellington and McGuire are likeable enough that it doesn't really matter. 

It's been ages since I've watched Torchwood, but when I saw this on the library shelves I remembered how much I enjoyed it. I liked the book - its great advantage is the pace, which is nice and zippy - but if the villains (both of them) are pretty paint-by-numbers both on the thug and the speculative side, then it's still a decent enough popcorn read. I read it while eating takeaways after a long day and it was exactly the kind of entertainment I wanted at the time. Quick, brainless fun. 

I've had this on my to-read list for a while, and now that I have access to a university library again I'm starting to make some headway on that list. During my last university residency, in 2023, the uni in question didn't have this book so I was super pleased to find that Otago did! 

It's a very interesting linguistic mix. The first collection of poetry published in English by a Pohnpeian poet, it still includes a lot of the Pohnpeian language - and over 70 footnotes explaining various terms. This was useful; I want to read more poetry that mashes up language like this but given my own inability to speak anything other than English and some very poor French my options are limited. Books like this increase accessibility and I'm glad to have them.

A lot of the poetry here is related to displacement and colonialism, with stories of Micronesians going to work in other countries or waging war for other countries or losing elements of their own culture - the "Urohs" of the titles is a traditional Pohnpeian skirt worn by women - or reclaiming it. One of the poems, "She Needs an Urohs", for example, is about buying one of the skirts for a young relative who prefers more modern clothes. There's a sense of homecoming and appreciation here that I liked very much, with sporadic entertaining asides. 

I'll have to check the library and see if Kihleng has written any other books. I'd like to read them. 

I've been reading the Star Trek tie-in novels, off and on, for decades. I don't know that I've read one where Pulaski was the main character before - or if I have, I've forgotten it. I liked her in TNG, for the year that she was there, so it was good to read a novel where she's the main doctor instead of Crusher. To mix it up even more, she's on a mercy mission to DS9, where a new version of the plague is affecting Bajorans, Cardassians, and even Ferengi. I liked her interactions with Dukat, and would have enjoyed more of them. 

I do think, however, that this mini-series is already at risk of being a little repetitive: mysterious figure doses a random location with contagion, and a Starfleet doctor takes the lead in curing it, at which point the mysterious figure basically rubs their murdering hands together and thinks "I'll do better next time!" Hopefully book three breaks the pattern a bit.

Finally, although I always enjoy Kira - she was one of the best characters on DS9 - I wonder if her subplot here was really necessary. It didn't seem to do much, or to illuminate her character any. 

It seems like every time I look at the news recently, I see a bunch of people who have been reading with their eyes shut and are going backwards. Someone needs to beat them over the head with Dr. Seuss and if they still won't learn, it's the pants-wearing crocodiles for them.

Let's face it, we'd all be better off. 

I've finally been able to read this, as I recently moved to Dunedin for work and there's a copy in the Hocken Library. It has to be read in the library, but that's alright as it's less than sixty pages long.

Acres was a writer and artist of children's books in New Zealand. She's mostly known now for her Hutu and Kawa picture books, first published back in the 1950s, which used flower fairies to talk about native plants and animals. I'm currently working on a project which includes a short study of these books, so I wanted to read a biography of Acres - and this is it, there's vanishingly little else - to see if there was any useful information that I could reference. There is, so that's helpful! Otherwise, it's a short chatty bio, and if it doesn't go into very great depths, it's still readable and interesting. 

I never thought that I'd be giving a western five stars - it's a genre that's never really appealed to me, despite how it's influenced a lot of the science fiction I love - but this was excellent. It's sprawling and enormous, which should be another strike against it as my patience for doorstoppers gets ever thinner, but even with a slow start, the characterisation was so fantastic that I got swept up despite myself. I could take or leave the plot, to be honest, but the characters are so well-formed and distinct that they overshadow everything else. I will say, though, that the characters I'm most likely to remember here are Gus and Clara. I suspect that many readers will feel the same about Call, but while I admire his construction there's more pity there than admiration, and it's harder to remember characters that inspire pity in the way that this one does. I almost feel like I'd be doing him a favour by forgetting him; it's probably what he would want.

Anyway, the book's violent and grim and in places it's just flat-out depressing, but it's leavened by the essential humanism of characters like Gus. I don't know that even with that leavening I'd call it a hopeful read, because it's less about hope than it is about just going on, but maybe that's enough. Against all my expectations, I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

I saw this on the library shelves, read the blurb, and liked the idea of it - a young fisherman loses his friend at sea after a fishing trip goes badly wrong, and decides to return the book his friend was reading to the man he borrowed it from. He ends up being taken in and becomes part of a community. It sounded like the kind of story I'd like, and I did like it. I do think, though, that the story is somewhat overshadowed by the prose. It's very elliptical and reflective, quite repetitive in a dreamy sort of way, and is absolutely overrun with commas. (I say that knowing that I use far too many of them myself.)

I can't say that the prose sucked me in. It's more that I got the impression of ice... something to slide over without getting much of a purchase. I can appreciate it even if it didn't appeal on an emotional level. I've not read anything else by the author, so I can't say if this style is common for him or not, but the whole reads as quite experimental to me. I'm interested, but not absorbed. 

"Myth was as real as a scalp being scraped for lice."

What a fantastic line! It's from the title poem, which is the best of the poems collected here - all of them are good, but that one's outstanding. I think I'm going to have to buy a copy of this for myself (I'm currently reading the one held by the university library) just so I can have that one poem on tap to read again whenever I want to.

It's always interesting reading work from authors who come from cultures that are so different from my own. Harjo is from the Muscogee Nation, and I'm certain that many of the mythological references here have gone over my head. The beauty of the imagery, however, remains, and it's folded into narratives about everyday life - although as I type that, I'm aware that for many there's probably no difference between the mythic and the everyday. For me there is, generally, although I'm in the middle of reading a book on island biogeography which talks about the construction of a myth around Darwin and his finches - a story which I've always held as true - so perhaps, in some strange convoluted way, there's a point of similarity after all. 

Mala is twelve when she and her cat end up living in the Polish woods, hiding from the Nazis after they massacred her entire family and every other Jew in the village in which they lived. Because she's blonde and speaks Polish well, she is able to survive by passing as a Polish girl, but it's still a bare existence, including the time spent as transported labour, working as a domestic in a German hotel.

Everywhere she goes, the cat goes with her. To be honest, that's why I picked up the book. I'd never heard of it before I saw it on the library shelves, and when I read the blurb I was instantly intrigued. And then, about halfway through the book, the cat essentially disappears from the story. Mala would be visiting a concentration camp, or being transported to England as a child refugee, and there'd be an occasional mention of the cat, but... how did she take it with her? Did no one ever comment? It's like the title character suddenly stops being part of the narrative entirely.

Which, I'm aware, is an unutterably spoilt thing to complain about, given the horrors that Mala lives through, and the things she has to do to keep herself alive. The point where her twelve-year-old self abandons a weeping seven-year-old relative to what she knows will be extermination, walking away with the cat because it's the only way to save her own life? Fucking horrific. I'm aware that complaining about the cat is, in comparison, ridiculous. Yet I picked up the book because of the cat - I think that'll be true of most readers - because it's a hook to entice people to pick up a book that they know will be grim. Mala's cat, and I wish there'd been more of a relationship shown between the two of them throughout the whole book, and not just half of it. 

Which is to say: Mala's experiences and her will to survive is incredible. The written presentation of those experiences, however, is somewhat uneven... and when judging the book and not the person, the writing counts.