octavia_cade's reviews
2611 reviews

I will say this for the Dunedin public library - which is a fantastic library! - they have a huge number of Star Trek books. There's so many of them they even have their own section in stack, as well as what's on the public shelves. Over the years someone in acquisitions has clearly been a fan, and given I'm in Dunedin for the next twelve months I'm hoping to get through a good many of them.

This is the first of a mini-series of six, all themed around biological weapons and plague. This volume's the TNG crew, set in the first year of that series, and it's a fast-paced, exciting read. I'm looking forward to the rest of them, as it's likely to prioritise the doctors in each series and I always tend to enjoy stories involving them doing actual medicine as opposed to, for instance, shacking up with the ghost lover of your dead grandmother, Beverly. That was such a dreadful episode, but Crusher is in her (medical) element here and it's a big improvement. 

This poetry collection was written during the time when the author spent a winter teaching in South Dakota - as such, it's impregnated with impressions of the prairie in winter. There's a lot of imagery spent on snow and wind and stars and blue light, and even more on driving through this frigid landscape. (I didn't count how many poems involved roads or highways, but there were a lot.) This meant that, even though I liked the poems individually, they could sometimes feel repetitive and began to blur together.

The poems I liked best were often focused less on that icy landscape in itself, and more on social issues such as poverty, especially as it related to farming and food and heating in such chilly environments. There was a paragraph-long reflection on Alice Walker's writing that made me gasp (you can find it immediately following the January 18 marker), and a small handful of poems about space exploration and the Challenger explosion that I found particularly affecting. 

I am slowly (very slowly) reading my way through the shortlist of the Mythopoeic awards, which goes back to the 1970s. All three books in this trilogy made it onto the shortlist of their year but none of them won. It was a bit of a slog, to be honest, although in all fairness the jump in quality after the first - dreadful - volume was significant. Epic fantasy can be a hard sell for me sometimes, and certainly that's a factor here, but more relevant, I think, was the lack of convincing women characters. Hell, there's barely any women here at all, and those who do make it onto the page are barely sketched out supporting roles. Kurtz is clearly capable of a more fleshed-out characterisation when it comes to her male characters, but if I'm going to wade through a thousand odd pages of epic fantasy I want more women to keep my interest. Actual women, not the cut-outs here. 

It's the best of the bunch, but it's saddled with a deeply unconvincing romance and it's clear the author still has no idea what to do with her women characters - where they exist (which is rare) they're the flattest portrayals possible. Also, there's a difference between an index and an appendix, and if an author is going to include four of the bloody things it might behoove her to cut that number by half by sticking the various names in a single index where they belong. 

When it comes to fantasy appendices Tolkien has a lot to answer for. As far as I'm concerned, if it's not interesting enough to make it into the text proper, keep it in the draft folder where it belongs. 

This anthology collects short pieces of nature writing by ninety different women. It's mostly prose, with the odd bit of poetry, and came about after the editor noted that most of the nature writing she read and admired had been written by men, so she started a deliberate search for that written by women. Hence the collection, although it's restricted to writers from the USA. Everything is well-written and compelling, although I note with interest that Mary Oliver refused permission to reprint "Wild Geese" in the anthology as she didn't feel that cataloguing the poem by gender was especially useful. It's one of my favourite poems, so that was a bit of a shame.

I've read a handful of the contributing authors before, including Ursula K. Le Guin and Terry Tempest Williams - I've very much enjoyed their previous work so no surprise that their respective contributions were some of my favourites here. For me, however, there was one piece that stood out from the rest - Annie Dillard's "Living Like Weasels". I made a note of the Dillard collection this essay was in so that I can get a copy of my own one day, because that essay was incredible.

As much as I enjoyed each piece separately, however, there were times when the overall effect came across as a little... glutinous, maybe? I know that nature writing tends towards the slower-paced, but there was nothing here longer than a handful of pages. Even ninety very short pieces shouldn't feel so slow as this, in my experience, but for some reason it did. Perhaps the effect was cumulative. A little more variation in the pacing amongst the individual pieces might have helped there, I think. 

I've finished up this second volume in the series, having read and reviewed the six issues collected here separately. So far the series hasn't really grabbed me with a must-keep-reading feeling, but I'm invested enough to keep going. I think I prefer this volume to the previous one, despite it having the odd issue that rated higher, because it feels as if there's a greater emphasis on the relationships between the different characters. Perhaps that's just a function of not having to do as much set-up, so the focus can lean more towards narrative now rather than worldbuilding. I liked it, anyway - all the issues got three stars from me. 

Ha! I like the one-eyed author in this issue, and how he defends his work as the trash it is. I too have written trash. I know it is trash. Should anyone ever try to interpret it in any fancy way then, frankly, they'd have to be dreaming. I write good things and I also write trash, so I've got instant sympathy for any author who's in the same boat, and let's face it - they all are.

This particular issue has made me marginally more interested in the robot prince. He does still feel like a walking subplot right now, but that may well change. 

That was sad, but I admit my first reaction was "better him than the Lying Cat". And if one of the grandparents had to kick the bucket, I suppose better it was kindly old grandpa rather than the nana who is more open to conflict. At least the latter keeps the plot going! Which is a rather inaccurate thing to say, now that I think about it - as if plots can only be kept going by negative interactions. In a universe like this one, though, that's probably more likely. 

Cute little counting book for small children, in which Corduroy the bear plays with four trucks and reads five books and so on, from one to ten. Cutest was the feeding of the nine ducklings, but all the illustrations here are quite sweet. It's easy to picture parents encouraging the counting of cupcakes and bubbles and so forth. 

The illustrations in the Smithsonian's Backyard books are always good, but these are excellent even by their standards. Lori Anzalone has done a great job there, and I confess I was much more taken by the illustrations than anything else. Which is not a slight against the text - this would be an interesting little book even with different illustrations (especially for someone who, like me, lives in a place far from alligators). It's just the artwork is particularly appealing here.

I did not know that red-bellied turtles laid their eggs in alligator nests! Seems a risky strategy to me, but apparently it pays off...