poisonenvy's reviews
865 reviews

Shatterglass by Tamora Pierce

adventurous mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

It should not have taken me as long as it did to read this book, but the fact that it has no audiobook and I haven't had much time for sitting down to read for pleasure this semester means that it took me forever to get through it. 

This was great though. I've been really enjoying this series and I'm excited to move on to the next sub-series. Following Tris and the others has been a real pleasure so far.  

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

reflective

4.0

I am hardly what one might call a poetic critic. I really can't recognize good poetry from bad by any stretch of the imagination.  I can recognize poems I like (though they tend to be few and far between). 

That being said, I generally enjoyed this. A lot of these poems were kind of 'meh' for me. But I also really enjoyed quite  a few of them.  And, of course, Emily Dickinson has written one of my all-time favourite poems: 

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,--
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

A High Wind in Jamaica: Or, The Innocent Voyage by Richard Hughes

adventurous medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Whelp, this book was unfortunately racist (and also has an unexpected amount of animal death). But let's go on: 

Emily, ten years old, and her siblings have spent most of her life living in Jamaica. When a hurricane destroys their house, the children are sent off to England for school. Unfortunately, they don't get very far before their ship is taken by pirates. 

This book is... Weird.  I don't really have any other way to put it. It's a very strange book.  Hughes's interpretation of childhood psychology is... Very strange. 

Anyway, I didn't love it and mostly finished it as it's required reading for my Pirate Lit class.  The last little bit is kind of gripping though. 

Dracula by Bram Stoker

dark slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

I was 18 or 19 the first time I read Dracula (or perhaps I was 17? I think I remember signing it out from my high school library now that I think about it).  I finished it unimpressed, but went "I'll read this again when I'm older and I'll see if I like it any better once my reading tastes have matured." 

Alas,  or so much.  The things that annoyed me then still annoy me now: the fact that it, like 95% of epistolary novels, does not read in the way people actually make journal entries, the phonetic spellings of people's accents, the overt religiosity which is fine for most of the book but becomes extremely thick in the last quarter or so. I doubt very much the lack of distinct character voice between any of our characters bothered me back then, though it does now. 

Overall, the novel just falls flat for me. I respect what it has done for the vampire genre of fiction. I absolutely recognize it's place in the canon of English literature.  It's fine and I don't like, hate it (and I'll be reading it again pretty much immediately to write a paper on it and the idea doesn't fill me with dread). But overall, this book just lands flat for me. 

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.75

The Dispossessed is a novel by Ursual K. Le Guin which takes place on the planets of Urras -- a capitalistic planet, though it does apparently have some social democratic states -- and Anarres -- an anachro-communist planet.  It follows the character of Shevek, a Anarrest theoretical physicist, alternating chapters between his present life as a visitor to Urras, and his past life trying to work out his feelings of justice and morality on Anarres. 

I'm not a fan of reading heavily didactic work, and this is not really an exception. I do often enjoy reading slow paced novels, but this one is extremely dry. The structure of the novel -- odd numbered chapters take place in the present Urras and even numbered chapters on the past Anarres -- prevents any ability for tension to grow; just when the narrative seems to be gathering steam, it is completely derailed by swapping to a different continuality (one time quite literally; as the rising tension and action of chapter nine nearly comes to a head, we're thrown onto a random train ride at the beginning of chapter 10). 

The characters are bland and flat, and at one point the main character sexually assaults another character for no understandable reason, plot wise, and it is never brought up again. The insistence on swapping timelines every chapter, even if it would make more sense on a narrative level to sometimes have two chapters in a row from one timeline, means the pacing is all over the place.  This book is both extremely didactic and extremely dry. The prose.... is not especially good. 

"But Ronnie?" you might ask. "Why did you continue reading it even when the rest of your book club decided it was our second DNF in nearly five years and 51 novels?"

Honestly, I was kind of interested in what was being... uh... didacted, mostly. It's the same reason I sloughed through Voltaire's <i>Candide</i> even though that was hardly a pleasurable reading experience.  This book has some interesting things to say about propaganda and the use thereof, of implicit obeyance, of societal expectations and pressures, especially unwritten ones, and raises questions about isolationist tendencies. 

This was my first Le Guin novel, but it definitely won't be my last (someday I will read the Earthsea novels).  I just hope the rest of them are.... better. 

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

adventurous dark emotional hopeful sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Woof. 

John Gay, Social Critic by Sven M. Armens

informative

3.75

I haven't read all of John Gay's writing -- I have, in fact, only read The Beggar's Opera and Polly -- and so that limited my full understanding of this text. But Armens' analysis of Gay's writing was understandable even without having read his other writings, and incredibly insightful as a way to parse through and read Gay's satire. I found it incredibly helpful in writing my paper about John Gay's plays -- this book from the 50s, unsurprisingly, doesn't look at any of Gay's writing through a queer or feminist lens, which was the topic of my paper, but even still it gave me a way to look at Gay's writing so that I could make my own analysis on those topics. 

Overall an incredibly helpful book that I ended up reading cover to cover despite absolutely not needing to. 

Shadows Return by Lynn Flewelling

adventurous dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

The prose can he a little choppy and sometimes the story can be a little silly/over the top, but overall I'm still very much enjoying following Alec and Seregil and co. throughout the Nightrunner series. 

In this one, Alec and Seregil are captured by slavers and separated throughout the book, though they don't stop trying to get back to one another. We get a bit more of Seregil's past, and their relationship hits some rocky points, but it's nice to see how they grow and change (Seregil's character development from the last book is especially nice).

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Sappho

reflective

4.75

Sappho with 
A crown of violets in her lap 
Leads the girls
With violets in their lapels

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

funny lighthearted medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Fun fact: when I was about 19 I once acted in a production of a Midsummer Nights Dream. 

This play is one of Shakespeare's more fun ones, and I find it especially funny. I had a lot of fun with it.  Lots of supplementary materials, some of them more accessible than others.