octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Rarely have I had such a neutral reaction to a book. I find the setting interesting and the characters absolutely flat - this is a folk tale dragged out to far past its natural length, but I think more important than the deadening effect of the characterisation is the fact that, even so, I can't stand the main character. He's unpleasant. Unpleasant protagonists can be interesting, of course, but Mebet never is. He's just sort of there, a plastic representation of archetype, and I'd like to say he gets what's coming to him and he sort of does, but it's all so watered down and emotionless that what's coming is the spiritual equivalent of a slap on the back of the wrist with a wet bus ticket. 

I do think there's a kernel of something compelling here, but it never quite reaches it for me, not on any level. 

 

This is the third in the "Invasion" mini-series, this time focusing on events at DS9. It seems a bit like an odd addition to the series, but that's not entirely a criticism. Indeed, being so very different from the first two volumes helps to set this one apart, and avoids repetition. That being said, with only a few very minor tweaks it could have been a completely standalone story, so I'm not entirely sure how well it has balanced being part of a mini-series. That said, I still enjoyed it. Bashir, especially, is done very well here, and his work as a doctor highlighted by his caretaker relationship to the Trill symbiont Dax (as opposed to the host Jadzia). I do enjoy Trek stories that focus on the doctors, and how their work intersects with often wider concerns, so points for that.

I honestly considered giving this four stars, but the fact is... I'm not sure I'd ever want to read it again, Bashir storyline notwithstanding. It's been an enormously slow read. Sometimes, when you read a book, the pacing is just right and you can skim through it, or linger in it, as the case may be. Here, I was constantly feeling bogged down, and I'm not sure why. I suspect it has something to do with the overuse of technobabble. I don't consume Trek for technobabble, I like it for the characters and sense of wonder and general optimism about the future, and technobabble stops that cold. As it did here, I think. Which is a bit of a shame. 

 

A collection of short essays that read mostly like blog posts - very chatty and informal. Many are themed around comedy and comedy writing, some are about relationships, and some are just random meanderings about things like chest hair on men. I'd like to have more to say but I don't. It was mildly entertaining and very, very slight. I think come tomorrow it will all have faded to the vaguest sense of inoffensive friendliness, and that's about it. 

A collection of short slice-of-life comics about various things from disappointing moments of glory to romantic failures to people who gossip about you when you take the last doughnut, and it's all mildly entertaining, if not as much fun as some of Barry's work. Some of it, sad to say, is a little difficult to read, but perhaps that's a sign of the times - cursive is not so much used these days, when we're all so much more familiar with type, and I do find it slightly irritating to decipher. Mostly, though, it's enjoyable but fairly slight, the kind of thing you can read in a daily newspaper, instantly understand, and then almost as instantly forget about. Nowhere near as enjoyable as The Greatest of Marlys, which remains my favourite of Barry's work I think. 

I've read several of Barry's books now, and I hate to say it, but I find her drawings so very ugly. They do nothing for me in an aesthetic sense (such sense that I have, anyway) and yet I find them so compelling regardless, a sort of train wreck grotesquerie. Which is such a good visual choice for this particular graphic novel, about an adolescent boy in a difficult home, who is framed for arson, bullied in school, and finally descends into mental illness. It sounds really grim, and it is grim, and yet there's something so slyly entertaining about it that it's difficult to look away. 

This collection of horror poems is organised as a bestiary - each entry comprises a short introduction on the type of creature featured, followed by several poems on that creature. I happen to love bestiaries, so points for that. I did enjoy that some of the monsters were distinctly unfamiliar to me; I'd never heard of the Melon Heads before, for instance. And in general I enjoyed the poems, which were highly alliterative (to the point where I started to wonder how much alliteration was in my own poems!). However, for me, one of the reasons I like poetry and read so much of it is poetry's ability to say multiple things at once. With the really good poems, I can read them over and over again and find different meanings each time. All too frequently here, though, the poems were almost more descriptive, more lyrical recaps of their introductions, and I found myself ultimately more interested in the interplay between poem and introduction than I was in the actual poems. 

It's not badly written, but it's not for me. I did like the 80s soundtrack running through here, I thought that was very clever, but in general this had all the subtlety of an anvil falling from a great height. In fairness to Sylvaine, Chopping Spree is very much in the teen slasher model of horror, and I don't think I've ever seen a slasher film that was subtle in any way, so this novella is certainly set firmly in type. (If you love those films - and I enjoy them myself, even if they're not my favourite type of horror - then you'll like this.) When it comes to capitalist cults, however, I tend to think that less is more. Probably because the consequences of unchecked capitalism are so awful that I don't need ritualistic murders to underline them; basic greed does well enough producing horror on its own.

Having side-eyed it for its obviousness, however, I'm going to state that any book with a title like Chopping Spree should have its murderers armed with axes instead of knives. Yes, I know. Rank hypocrisy on my part. 

This was really interesting, and for the most part extremely accessibly written, which is not as common as it might be with regards to academic literature. It is in places a little repetitive - I'm not sure that it needed two essays focusing on Constantine, but for the most part it covers the history of Satan in film extremely well, and over the broadest possible time period. Given the subject of the book, the vast majority of the chapters are concerned with horror films, or horror-adjacent films, but there's the odd chapter that deals with non-horror representations, for instance the chapter that looks at The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ. I think the chapters I enjoyed most here were "Agency or Allowance: The Satanic Complications of Female Autonomy in The Witches of Eastwick and The Witch" by Simon Bacon, and "Murnau's Faust and the Wiemar Moment" by Barry C. Knowlton and Eliose R. Knowlton. This last wasn't anything I was familiar with, but it was fascinating nonetheless!

Overall, though, the book's an enjoyable read with a perhaps not-very-surprising conclusion: that portrayals of Satan in cinema are very much set in the cultures of their time, affected by contemporary issues. That it is not a surprising statement takes nothing away from its general validity, I think. 

I read Wolf Hall, one of Fox’s shorter pieces, earlier in the year and enjoyed it, so thought I’d try another of hers and I’m glad I did. It’s a historical romance this time, as opposed to the arguably paranormal romance of before, and it was well worth it. I haven’t read a lot of gay historical romance prior to this year (and I still haven’t read that much of it), but what I have read has been thoughtful and appealing and A Gentleman Tutor is no different. The protagonist, especially, is extremely likeable, and if the love interest can be somewhat spineless in his behavior at times, there’s a good reason for it, and by the end it’s clear that, with help, he’s doing his best to be a better person. I don’t know why efforts at men’s emotional growth are more apparent to me in gay romance than the straight equivalent (perhaps it’s just a skewed result from a too-small sample size) but it’s a welcome change nonetheless. 

This is rather more what I expected Longing for Running Water to be like, albeit in retrospect. The mix of feminism, religion, and environmentalism is still one that’s largely alien to me, as my own lack of religion means that large swathes of the experiences described here are unfamiliar – but that’s fine, the reason I read books like this is to learn things. And credit where it’s due, this collection has brought together a wide range of approaches from a variety of different women and different religions. The effect is one of commonality across borders, as it were, as the need for sustainable living and respect for nonhuman life is prioritized in reaction to a world where that prioritization is not always evident. Most of the essays were interesting and accessible; I think the one that made the biggest impression was the one on sexual imagery as it relates to the atom bomb, which was not a topic I expected to find here, and which was bizarrely compelling.