Unsatisfying in that way that means unresolved and complicated, deftly unwhole. Many sharp edges here to trip on as the tensions balance, themes of science and religion and addiction and belief and knowing and honesty and confiding, all these tragic things with holes in the middle.
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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
2025 Reading Goal
21% complete! loppear has read 17 of 80 books.
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loppear started reading Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
The Wretched of the Earth (French: Les Damnés de la Terre) is a 1961 book by the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, …
loppear started reading Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor, Nnedi Okorafor
The future of storytelling is here.
Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in …
loppear started reading The Wild Iris by Louise Glu ck

The Wild Iris by Louise Glu ck
From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, a stunningly beautiful collection of poems that encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms …
loppear reviewed Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
loppear reviewed Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
classic and briefly infuriating
4 stars
An escalating absurdity of doing nothing. Opting out of society, non-violence and coercion, office work and monotony and sanity, it goes on too long and is just right.
loppear reviewed Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye by Alex White (The Starmetal Symphony)
loppear reviewed Nature's Best Hope by Douglas W. Tallamy
grow more bugs
4 stars
An ecologist's popular appeal to replace lawn with native plants - echoing EO Wilson and Margaret Renkl, calling on all to set aside half for ecological conservation in a mass distributed preserve - and the broad beneficial effects of gardening for ecosystem health: grow lots of bugs to feed lots of birds and beyond.
loppear started reading Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville

Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized …
loppear reviewed Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (duplicate)
dystopian robot future with an underlying warmth
4 stars
Reminiscent of Monk and Robot though broader and darker, we're along for a calm inquisitive road novel with an earnest robot butler some moment after the world as they and we know it ended. Satirically enjoys itself in upending formulaic scenes and takes us to some imaginative places, surprisingly light fun.
loppear reviewed All Our Kin by Carol B. Stack
attentive ethnography
5 stars
A deep intimate consideration of racialized poverty outside of Chicago in the 1970s, entirely recognizable today for the structural inequalities in how generations continue to "fail" to make it in American society and how they cope by sharing, swapping, and delaying relations of obligation to create networks of care and kin that redefine still-current ideas of family bonds. Beyond the central non-judgemental shift in understanding the networks of domestic care in circumstances where neither individual nor family resources are adequate to survival, I was struck by how the dependent and mutual relationships of poverty echo the communitarian and degrowth goals of decentering the nuclear family, making do with less together, of giving more than you have in mutual obligation to your neighbors, and how class fear of poverty and interdependence are obstacles to reaching out to each other.
loppear reviewed The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson
eels as a lens on knowing
4 stars
Well handled familiar alternation between animal facts - the mysterious for millenia and perhaps still now lifecycle of eels from the Sargasso Sea to freshwater streams and back - epistemology - eels role in slow scientific discovery and in fear and myth as a way of knowing - and memoir - growing up fishing for eels with his father, cultural foodways and facing fears and unknowns, late in life family revelations.
loppear started reading Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye by Alex White (The Starmetal Symphony)

Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye by Alex White (The Starmetal Symphony)
loppear started reading Laozi's Dao de Jing by Laozi
loppear started reading Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller “Homegoing” is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about …