User Profile

loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years, 4 months ago

Reading for fun, threads over the years of scifi, history, social movements and justice, farming, philosophy. I actively work to balance out the white male default in what I read, but have a long way to go.

He/they for the praxis.

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loppear's books

Currently Reading (View all 6)

2025 Reading Goal

33% complete! loppear has read 27 of 80 books.

Frantz Fanon: Wretched of the Earth (2001, Penguin Books)

The Wretched of the Earth (French: Les Damnés de la Terre) is a 1961 book …

These reflections on violence have made us realize the frequent discrepancy between the cadres of the nationalist party and the masses, and the way they are out of step with each other. In any union or political organization there is a traditional gap between the masses who demand an immediate, unconditional improve-ment of their situation, and the cadres who, gauging the difficulties likely to be created by employers, put a restraint on their demands. Hence the oft-remarked tenacious discontent of the masses with regard to the cadres. After a day of demonstrations, while the cadres are celebrating victory, the masses well and truly get the feeling they have been betrayed. It is the repeated dem-onstrations for their rights and the repeated labor disputes that politicize the masses. A politically informed union official is someone who knows that a local dispute is not a crucial con-frontation between him and management. [...] The creation of nationalist parties in the colonized countries is contemporary with the birth of an intellectual and business elite.

Wretched of the Earth by  (Page 63)

(...as a counter balance to the question of established representation...)

Rebecca Solnit: Orwell’s Roses (Paperback, 2021, Granta)

“In the year 1936 a writer planted roses.” So begins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a …

pleasant inquiry in botanically-tinged biography

In Solnit's delightful way, chapter essays bound between slices of Orwell's biography and bibliography and social commentary on the role of roses, labor, beauty, colonialism, and fascism's conflicts with truth and language. As these are pervasive themes for Orwell too, the ground is plentiful for analysis, all brought back to earth in the garden.

reviewed If We Burn by Vincent Bevins

Vincent Bevins: If We Burn (Hardcover, 2023, PublicAffairs)

The story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world — and what …

a decade of non-US protest, to what ends?

Outstanding journalist's history of 2010s protests and mass-media enabled uprisings, covering Arab Spring, Brasil & Chile, Hong Kong, and Ukraine. Using first-hand accounts and succinct late 20th-century local and global context about what power dynamics came before for each case study, this follows the movements in the streets and the outcomes over subsequent years. Ultimately challenges the narratives of horizontalism, leaderless movements, and corporate-tech-mediated uprisings as a path for change, with particular focus on co-opting of the same by right-wing elements and a need to pragmatically account for what power will fill the vacuum once regimes are toppled to realize any popular demands.

Hala Alyan: Salt houses (2017)

"From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between …

always at a remove

An intimate family saga of Palestinian diaspora, comfortably middle-class non-participants in every conflict that touches them, forced to flee and always outsiders in their moves for family and safety through the Middle East Arab world. Lovingly rendered, looking back, looking for peace.

Sally Rooney: Intermezzo (Hardcover, english language, 2024, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have …

inwardly tense and sex-filled

Marvelous capture of two brothers coming to understand themselves better through emotional and sexual relationships they judge themselves over and fear society and family and each other will judge them too. The characters are mostly loving, worried, and care-free - without the demands of care (their father has recently passed; there are only adult children here), they are free to be lost about what love is for most of the book.

Sandra Newman: Julia: A Novel (Paperback, 2023, Granta Books)

An imaginative, feminist, and brilliantly relevant-to-today retelling of Orwell’s 1984, from the point of view …

uncomfortably real and worthwhile

A thorough re-shaping of 1984, the fear and hate in authoritarian distrust remains centered from this more sympathetic and capable and resourceful perspective, with welcome nuance and complications as hope and care slip in and out of reach.

Caroline Criado Perez: Invisible Women (Hardcover, 2019, Harry N. Abrams)

Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and …

frustrating on the surface and in depth

On the one hand this is clear and infuriating, a wide ranging look at how male-as-default, often unquestioned or under-researched, in infrastructure, transportation, medicine, employment and care and GDP, etc, makes the world much worse for women and also for everyone. Yet the book speaks of women almost entirely as a monolithic global whole - slight mentions of hormonal or racial complications, but basically no intersectional or queer consideration. As the author is often asking for better nuanced and dis-aggregated data analysis on this single important binary, we could use a version of this book that took that conclusion to a full embrace of considered complicated no-simple-norms human society.

Nnedi Okorafor, Nnedi Okorafor: Death of the Author (2025, William Morrow)

The future of storytelling is here.

Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing …

Didn't love much about this.

Strong potential in near future Nigerian/American family tensions of over fame and disability, Chicago and African settings, interwoven with a further out robot society facing human-like challenges of witnessing cataclysm. And large parts, especially the more painful, feel like and are author-memoir. So disappointing to dislike most of the characters and their overall arcs, through accident and levels of seeking independence.

replied to Sean's status

@seanderson13 the reviews are correct, it's a major blind spot. As with the central thesis that default male structures and data ignore and elide women's needs, the book speaks of women almost entirely as a monolithic whole. The author's recurring demands for disaggregated data analysis and diverse voices in decision-making leave an unspoken echo in my head "yes, along so much more than this single dimension".