User Profile

loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years, 1 month 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 5)

2025 Reading Goal

12% complete! loppear has read 10 of 80 books.

Erik Larson: The Splendid and the Vile (Paperback, 2022, Crown Publishing Group) 4 stars

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland …

Doesn't play to Larson's strengths

3 stars

Churchill and the Blitz, with source material from many ancillary characters who might have been more fascinating as the focus, which is tightly on Churchill's movements in his first year as PM. Necessarily selective while trying to add color and context from family, secretaries, and Germans, this doesn't tie up well for me but is nonetheless well written and researched.

reviewed A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark (Dead Djinn Universe, #1)

P. Djèlí Clark: A Master of Djinn (Hardcover, 2021, Tor) 4 stars

Nebula, Locus, and Alex Award-winner P. Djèlí Clark returns to his popular alternate Cairo universe …

inventive steampunk fantasy

3 stars

Loved the world setting and intensity of the determined women leads in an epic murder-magic-catastrophe, though the whodunnit procedural hunt for obscured informants plodded some for me.

reviewed August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White (The Starmetal Symphony, #1)

Alex White: August Kitko and the Mechas from Space (Paperback, 2022, Orbit) 4 stars

When an army of giant robot AIs threatens to devastate Earth, a virtuoso pianist becomes …

Nostalgic and absurdist

3 stars

Madcap mashup of music theory appreciation, 80s mech battles, queer and starstruck. The first third's dry and cataclysmic wit at the end of the world shifts to a somewhat more conventional (?) military space soap opera rom com, I do wish it had kept the gay piano bar Douglas Adams vibe more prominent.

Robert Chapman: Empire of Normality (Hardcover, 2023, Pluto Press) 5 stars

'Groundbreaking ... [provides] a deep history of the invention of the 'normal' mind as one …

good historical lens on "neurodiversity and capitalism"

4 stars

Framing the history of psychiatric definitions of normality in their origins of eugenics, racism, and capitalist to neoliberal emphasis on individual ranking and pathologizing of the ab-normal. Rounds it out with a broad view of the neurodiversity movement in response to the mass-disabling of round-the-clock capitalist consumerist desires and inequalities.