This was nice, visually engaging, girl-led, empowering, power of truth and justice in collective struggle.
Reviews and Comments
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 reviewed Ink Girls by Marieke Nijkamp
loppear reviewed Hunger Mountain by David Hinton
beautiful philosophical bridge
5 stars
A perfect blend of deep historical translation, East vs West metaphysics and cosmology, mindfulness, poetry, and walks in the woods. Seeing mind as landscape, emptying our mind like "gazing into a flawless mirror of sky", in sincerity our inner thoughts are the same as our outer thoughts.
loppear reviewed A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum
Did not enjoy, but that's understandable
3 stars
This was a struggle, the setting and generational story of arranged marriages, domestic violence, and isolated women in strict conservative households is grounded, relevant, and sometimes well delivered. The author stand-in character really irked me in her attempts at advice, and I'm realizing it's regularly difficult for me to read average characters acting confused in the dark about well-foreshadowed violence.
loppear reviewed There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
loppear started reading Ink Girls by Marieke Nijkamp
loppear reviewed Fine Structure by qntm
several good storylines
3 stars
Vivid and imaginative, crams so much in and not all of it fits but such fun. I originally read this as it was appearing wiki'd on e2, and many years later it reads much more like comic book superheroes than hard mysterious sci-fi, and that's perfectly enjoyable.
loppear reviewed Orbital by Samantha Harvey
my bookclub did not like this
5 stars
Look, this is not-a-novel and is not-sci-fi, unless we freeze and shatter those definitions - but I would read more fictive-philosophical-observational whatever this was on most any subject. There's no plot, there's hardly movement as we do just what it says at the top, circle the earth 16 times in a single day aboard the space station. Instead, we dive deeply into the human experience of Earth, family and civilization and war and politics and futures, and separation and disorientation from it all.
loppear reviewed The way it is by William Stafford
loppear reviewed Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner)
the movie is noir and cyberpunk, but this hardly is
4 stars
Oddly hilarious, actual electric sheep, and an overindulgence of layers of binaries between real and simulacra, valued and disposable, purpose and performance, without an attempt to choose sides in a dark doomed world.
loppear reviewed South to America by Imani Perry
challenging
3 stars
A difficult read: first for a rambling conversational style that demands steady accumulation along threads of memoir, travel, genealogy, and history; second and deeply, for layering complications on The South, our senses of racism and slavery and treason and charm. Responding to current events - BLM, MeToo, Monuments - but not lingering there for long.
loppear reviewed Wilding by Eric Schlosser
lovely on unexpected ecological joys when we let go
3 stars
If you had a castle and 3500 acres intensively farmed dairy pastures and crops, and realized that wasn't sustainable, and so sought conservation funding to let it return to a wild state... this is the book is for you to rethink what wild might mean. Presents a hopeful sense that conservation and ecological repair should not be a static goal or species-specific understanding or undertaking ("this used to be wetlands, these birds are only found in closed-canopy forests") but a dynamic stepping back and observing and waiting to find out what the purpose of letting nature proceed may be.
loppear reviewed Matters of Care by María Puig de la Bellacasa
responding to more-than-human feminist complications
4 stars
It is hard to say easily what this directly contributes, a weaving and complication of many thinkers - Latour, Haraway, Tronto, Stengers - on care's challenges, on critique and trust-building - dissent from within - for avoiding objectification and maintenance of obligations to more than just our tribe, to more than just human relationships. Roves slowly from STS to permaculture and soil ecological timescales, full of considered light shoves and repositionings of our language and thinking.
loppear reviewed The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein
promising start and pace
4 stars
Content warning for some reason the slow steady conceptual reveal here wants to be hidden, but no plot spoilers
What a curious and lovely blend of stock fantasy and overturned expectations - a trudging journey of mysterious import through rival wizards realms, a steady unwrapping of a tension in the world between academic pursuit and dispersal of knowledge versus technological hoarding of power and secrets.