This... is bizarre. It's just really very strange, in a creepy, fascinating sort of way. Apparently it was banned in Iran after having caused a number of suicides, a literary equivalent to Gloomy Sunday but substantially weirder. It's all first-person narration, a long descent into insanity and opium addiction, and the two merge together into a maelstrom of repetitive and surrealistic images so that it's hard to tell what's real and what isn't. I can't say that it's a pleasant read, exactly, but it is a compelling one, and I think a lot of that is down to the structure. Particularly the structure on a sentence level: images keep repeating in different ways, but the words are the same. Phrases used over and over, a layering of meaning. I don't think I've read anything quite like it... there are flashes reminiscent of Mervyn Peake and Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, but it's also distinctly different from all these. There's something inescapably wallowing about it, something sticky and glutinous and disturbing. I might have a clearer idea if I were to read it again, but then I don't think I particularly want to read it again... 

I've read and reviewed each of the four books collected here separately, so this is really just for my own records. The rating is an average of the individual ratings: the first book, Playing for Keeps, scraped two stars from me, and the rest didn't earn more than one. So why are you reading them Octavia? you ask, and it's a valid question. I'm making a deliberate attempt to read more romance, and I basically lucky-dip books by picking random lists and working my way through the books on them. Well, a lot of people love this series, because one of those damn lists had five of these books on, I think, and I've made my way through the first four, trying to see what others see in them, and I've given it a good shot but I'm not getting it. Looking at the reviews, lots of people see this series as hot and funny, with likeable characters, and I'm glad they've found something they liked, but my reaction is the opposite. Unpleasant people being horrible to each other and it turning into romance does not do it for me, and with the constant focus on stuffing themselves and stealing food, my image of the Bradford men is pretty much giant walking tapeworms. It's not attractive. 

I think these books are supposed to be funny, but I'm just not getting it. Elizabeth and Robert seem to be in a state of constant war, and everyone around them just finds it amusing? I don't feel entertained by either of them. More than anything, I think, I read their antics and just feel kind of embarrassed for them. I will say that the food-hogging characteristic of the Bradford family has been blessedly toned right down in this - it's a lightly used quirk, rather than a constant hammering of piggery, and is much more palatable for it - but unfortunately the endless repetition has been focused elsewhere. "Minx" is a cringe-inducing word at the best of times, and it doesn't improve after several hundred uses. (It's probably not several hundred, but if this were a drinking game I'd be at the hospital right now getting my stomach pumped.)

I don't mind that the whole thing is, shall we say, lacking in accurate historical detail. Mathewson made it clear in the prologue that she's not a primarily historical writer and she wasn't aiming for realism and you know what, good for her. Try new things and all that, I'm prepared to view it as history-lite, even if the daughter of an earl is going to a ball with nothing on under her dress. I am less forgiving of the not-like-other-girls trope, which is here in spades. I will admit the accuracy, though: Elizabeth is indeed not like other girls. She's ten times as annoying, at least. 

This low rating is not a reflection of the very impressive scholarship that this book displays. It is a reflection of the fact that it is phenomenally dull. To me, anyway. Look, I'm not religious, but religion can be interesting. There are interesting religious books out there! This is not one of them. It is not, I think, the fault of the authors - the modern authors, at least. There's only so much you can do with ancient scrolls that are missing a lot of text. Let me give an example of what you might read if you were to pick up this book: "He is the Lord [...] He made the [...I] adjure all [...] [...] and all [...] which [...] before [...] the earth [...] [...]" (p.454).

What I'm saying is that this is very fragmentary. In fairness, not everything is like the above. Some paragraphs only have half a dozen odd absences, products of damage in the original material. But some of it is so fragmentary it's nigh on unreadable to the layperson, which I am. (No doubt religious scholars are fascinated). And what there is that's readable is often deeply repetitive: I don't know how many instructions on slaughtering lambs for sacrifice I had to read to finish this, but it was a lot. "Odour is pleasing to the Lord" my arse, it seemed like these endless instructions were more to set the priests to gorging than anything else.

I'm glad I've read it, but having read it I'm never doing so again and this book's going to the local free library where it can bore someone else (and free up space on my shelves). I would say, though, that the introduction was genuinely interesting, and I think I would like to read a good popular history book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, just so long as I never have to slog through them myself ever again. 

A quick, enjoyable mystery, though I do think it's a little laboured in some places. The solution of the mystery, at the end of the book, describes a sequence of events that is very convoluted, and which I frankly did not much credit, but I was engaged in the story up until that point, so the last few pages didn't spoil it entirely. I was surprised to find, however, that Miss Marple is really only a supporting character here. She solves the mystery, of course, but for a lot of the book she's entirely in the background. I've only read one other of the Miss Marple books, and that was a year or two back so I don't entirely remember the level of focus placed upon her, but I've read rather more of the Poirot books and he always seems much more centre stage. Oh well. It didn't affect my enjoyment - the story still zipped along very quickly - but I hope, when I get around to reading other books in this series, that Miss Marple gets a bit more attention, because I enjoy her absolute cynicism about the world... genteel as the expression of that cynicism may be. 

Rarely have I read prose so purple. Overwritten and immensely silly. 

The first Sherlock Holmes adventure! The introduction tells me that Conan Doyle wrote for serials, which I didn't know but, after reading this, does not surprise me. There's a rather episodic feel to it, and I'm not wholly convinced by the structure. The second half begins with a lengthy Mormon backstory, a love story ending tragically, and while it's there to give some personality and motivation to the murderer and the victims, I think I'd rather have stuck to the mystery proper than gone on that odd but entertaining detour. The whole is a good introduction to Holmes, though, and the meeting between him and Watson, and how they set up together in Baker Street, is fun to read. 

 This was a short, really enjoyable book of poems, largely in bestiary form and largely about fish. In a few cases it wandered into mythology and science history - the long prose poem the collection ended on was about US atomic testing in the Pacific - but the bestiary poems were the ones that stood out for me. They tended to be short and deceptively simple; of these, "Anemone" is my favourite. The rest, which comprised maybe a third, tended to be longer and, for me at least, more disjointed, with lots of different images (or different names, particularly of types of fish in different languages) stuck together. With one exception, I didn't enjoy these so much, but that one exception was the best poem of the book. Called "U.S.," it's a long list of descriptions of America where all the descriptions are fish. That sounds ridiculous, I know, but it's honestly quite amazing: "The U.S. is a small fish / with a false head; or a big fish / with false scales; or a dream / of the perfect fish / that turns into a nightmare" (p. 50) and on it goes, fishy metaphor after fishy metaphor, dozens of them, and I was delighted. 

 It's odd - I'm almost sure I've never read this before, but of course I know the story. Everyone does. The afterword notes this, saying that over 90 films have been made, which seems like a ridiculous amount to me but would certainly explain the cultural creep. And it's such a good idea, if not perhaps entirely original... the evil in a person split off, transformed into its own personality. The transformation, of course, is not truly absolute - Jekyll presents as a good person, but that is largely affectation, as he's prepared to indulge the part of himself that is Hyde, even knowing the effects it will have on other people. It's more separation than transformation.

Regardless, as I said: I was almost sure I hadn't read this before, so I decided to make an end to uncertainty. Having read it, I'm even more certain. It certainly wasn't what I expected and I think I would have remembered that undermining of expectation. I liked it, but I liked the image of what it was better, if that makes any sense. It's a fractured, elliptical sort of story, told from multiple perspectives, not all of which are entirely trustworthy. The text's an exercise in reading between the lines, which is interesting, but it's also a little bit duller than I thought it would be, a little bit muted, and more than a little repetitive, which I suppose is what happens when several people recount shared experiences from their respective different points of view. But it also has the great virtue of being short, with a good deal packed into relatively few pages, and I always appreciate that. 

 This has taken me literally months to read because it's so enormously dry. The introduction and the conclusion have some sense of life in the prose, so why it all died out in the chapters proper I don't know. The chapter on epistemology almost sent me into coma.

I admit, a lot of my disappointment stemmed from the title: Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation. Sounds great, right? But looking at some of the other editions, some of them seem to have another subtitle (or is it a series title?) and that is Biblical Reflections on Ministry. That last is far more accurate. This is a very dry, very abstract book about religion. I am not religious. I appreciate that the author is, but I also expect the title of a book to reflect its contents, and I honestly would have thought twice about picking it up if I'd known it would be filled with things like epistemology and the language of the Trinity and the need to pray. I expected ecology to be in it somewhere, and a focus on the relationship between women and nature. Instead, there's some vague positivity about treating the planet well, and when biodiversity does get a (very brief) look-in... well. The author's not actually talking about biodiversity. She's talking about pluralism of religion, and cultural diversity. Which is fine, but my biologist self, when reading that biodiversity is the different characters of children within a family, is rolling her eyes and rolling them hard.

All of which litany of complaint may indicate that there's nothing worthwhile here, but that wouldn't be true. This book is primarily directed at Latin American Christian women, and I am only the last of these things. Definitely not the target audience. And I must say, I found it very difficult for quite a while to see the feminism in here at all, but as I slogged my way through I began to grasp that that judgement, at least, was entirely wrong. It's made me realise my understanding of feminism has been pretty limited, and I've rarely considered it in a religious context. That's a gaping blind spot, and at least now I'm aware such a blind spot exists, so credit where it's due. And I can dimly grasp what Gebara is saying here: that patriarchal religion is strongly focused on the individual and that a feminist response is to focus on relationships instead - relationships with other individuals, with other (and different) communities, and with the natural world. Furthermore, that this change in focus would lead to a more just world. The arguments are solid, as far as I can grasp, I just don't find them accessible. A move from abstraction into extended concrete examples would have made it much more appealing.