User Profile

loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 5 years 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

2026 Reading Goal

5% complete! loppear has read 4 of 75 books.

Sarah Ruhl: Lessons from My Teachers (2025, Scribner) No rating

Based on her popular class at Yale, this masterful, intimate essay collection from one of …

From the introduction, "I went through a dark period, in which the world seemed to have shrunk. The world seemed to be the size of my pocket, in which was a phone."

reviewed The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings, #0)

J. R. R. Tolkien: The Hobbit (Paperback, 1977, Ballantine Books)

Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who wanted to be left alone in quiet comfort. But …

adventure fun

Last read as a kid, re-read with my daughter, remains a quick-paced inventive fantasy adventure, I only had to skip over a few racist descriptions. I had more fun singing the songs as an adult than they were when I was a kid, could even have used a few more!

R.F. Kuang: Katabasis (Paperback, 2025, 47North)

Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their …

dark skewering academia

A tumbling of traumatic scenes in hell and in university, a logical-paradox-driven magick gives as many fun revisits to mathematical puzzles as to Dante's Inferno or the Rigveda. Less convinced of the plot and character motivations, but the pace keeps up well enough.

Amitav Ghosh: Gun Island (2019)

Bundook. Gun. A common word, but one which turns Deen Datta's world upside down.

powerfully improbable through an appropriate lens

Ghosh's non-fiction "The Great Derangement" explores the role of literary fiction in dealing with climate and colonialism, and the modern novel's turn to telling stories about the individually inwardly probable vs our condition of surprising and irrational experiences of nature and disaster. "Gun Island" is his response on climate and desperate migration, with increasingly improbable coincidence and unease challenging the protagonist's grip on scientific realism.

William Kotzwinkle: E.T., the book of the Green Planet (1985, Putnam)

The gentle extraterrestrial's return to his home planet discloses that he has fallen out of …

very middle grade fiction

Not great literature! Did E.T. need this sequel? No. But for the middle grade plot and Eliot-as-a-fumbling-hormonal-pre-teen, this was a fun absurdist romp on E.T.'s home planet acting out a 1000-year-old miscreant getting "in the soup".

Dougald Hine: At Work in the Ruins (2023, Chelsea Green Publishing)

Dougald Hine, world-renowned environmental thinker, has spent most of his life talking to people about …

conflicting, still left me thinking

A challenge, a surrender. Climate change advocate becomes disenchanted with the "believe the science" dogmatic and othering polarization, wants to withdraw into a more contested, other-ways-of-knowing, art's-more-than-a-message-deliverer, science-is-also-what-got-us-here. BUT global covid response was his limit: we should be more accepting of death, too much of the book is his fears of the authoritarian-science alignment of vaccine mandates and none of the book considers the anti-science factions his discomforts are in dialog against. Another path is ahead, and he's humble in not having answers to what that is or where it goes, instead like Hospicing Modernity asks us to sit with the discomfort. Indeed.

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Saturation Point (Hardcover, 2024, Solaris)

A group of scientists and soldiers are hunted by mysterious enemies in a terrifying new …

cli-fi action

In the range of Tchaikovsky stories, this is good but not great - our expectation of still being the last around to see the desolation of an unliveable climate is neatly confronted, and the Roadside Picnic references land, but the plot and motivation did not.