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loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 8 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

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2023 Reading Goal

78% complete! loppear has read 79 of 101 books.

Now Is Not the Time to Panic (2022, HarperCollins Publishers) 4 stars

"Okay, let's make some art"

4 stars

Small town teenage summer before the internet, feeling like an outsider in a place that is the same as everywhere else and always a half-beat in the past, making something weird and making something out of nothing, and holding on to that for feeling alive. At half-way I wondered, and the story pulled on ahead where it needed to go.

Rendezvous with Rama (Rama, #1) (2000) 4 stars

Rendezvous with Rama is a science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke first …

helps to know the sequels are worse

2 stars

A promising opening of mysterious object and dry elder academic panel bickering.... oh don't let this be just a cool exploration of the physical properties of this space... in space... with bonus tangential misogyny... oh, the physical properties and some cold-war-commentary at least accelerate... pity for the futuristic anachronisms, 1973 feels closer to Jules Verne than to us.

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022) 5 stars

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had …

write others the world you wish for

4 stars

On the one hand, this is fictive academic non-fiction, with the conceit of oral histories to make it direct and also obviate even a latent plot or characterization. On the other hand, it is communal utopia spun from our current set of dystopias, centering imagined voices young and old across a range of questions of care and process and identity and standing up together as our world came apart and we needed each other.

Thinking in Systems (2008) 5 stars

(I haven't re-read this in a decade, but still think in it)

5 stars

Clear and illustrative use of language shines through this (and is immediately recognizable from Limits to Growth). Really outstanding short introduction to systems thinking, why systems surprise us, and why systems thinking is also no silver bullet for control of the complex systems that make up our world. The best (and final) chapters of this book are available online www.donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ and www.donellameadows.org/dancing-with-systems/

Some Desperate Glory (2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 4 stars

All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of …

Growth from a dark place

4 stars

Incredible pace and a depth of painful experiences that beautifully if implausibly bend towards light and attempting to right wrongs when our characters break loose and are able to reflect. Despite some structural misgivings, I loved everywhere this went.

A Room With A View (Paperback, 2007, Book Jungle) 3 stars

One of E. M. Forster's most celebrated novels, "A Room With a View" is the …

And a lovely companion piece to Still Life.

4 stars

Smart cozy skewering of English class and respectability, old Europe's wonder and modern sensibility, flipping effortlessly between interior mental changes and a range of characters observations with the author's judgement right alongside.

Crooked Cucumber (Paperback, 2000, Broadway) 5 stars

life mixed with experience

4 stars

Touching biography, first half in Japan second in California - the life of balancing between conservative hierarchy in service and childlike wonder in welcoming mistakes. Either of these paths could be selfless or ego-driven, and either might require a deep bravery to see through.