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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.

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.

a good middle book, less angst but less satire, more complicated feels about genocide and cute aliens

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.

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.

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.

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.