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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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."
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."
"For sheer storytelling delight and pure adventure, Treasure Island has never been surpassed. From the …
Last read as a kid, re-read with my daughter. Really well-paced classic swashbuckling kid-on-an-adventure, mis-steps and mutiny and murders move quickly along.
Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who wanted to be left alone in quiet comfort. But …
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!
Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their …
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.
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.
An expansion of the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning story. Arboreality is a finalist …
A few wonderfully interlinked generations on Vancouver Island in catastrophic decline and re-imagining of forest.
Bundook. Gun. A common word, but one which turns Deen Datta's world upside down.
…
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.
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.
The gentle extraterrestrial's return to his home planet discloses that he has fallen out of …
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".
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, world-renowned environmental thinker, has spent most of his life talking to people about …
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.
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.
A group of scientists and soldiers are hunted by mysterious enemies in a terrifying new …
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.
There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This isn’t her story.
Meet Toadling. On …
A familiar fairytale form with each turn twisted or flipped just right with a light touch.
A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated …
Ambitious and did not overall work for me, although I cared more the further we went with the steady accompanying biographies unreeling the mundane and migratory unsettlings of Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu.
Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for …
Something beautifully multifaceted arising from complex relations, a quantum theorist writes a clear and compact dissolution or eulogy of our understanding of time in artful conversation with ancient poets and thinkers.
The collective's introduction describes the debt-fueled consolidation and abdication of ownership in Argentina precipitating collapse in 2001; the accounts and interviews that follow reveal workers occupying their places of employment out of desperation for missed paychecks and to keep owners from stealing the equipment before bankruptcy, and finding a path in the face of violence and corruption to operate the facilities themselves, with the aid of national economic turmoil and popular support for small-scale intermediate options between nationalization and global capitalism.
The collective's introduction describes the debt-fueled consolidation and abdication of ownership in Argentina precipitating collapse in 2001; the accounts and interviews that follow reveal workers occupying their places of employment out of desperation for missed paychecks and to keep owners from stealing the equipment before bankruptcy, and finding a path in the face of violence and corruption to operate the facilities themselves, with the aid of national economic turmoil and popular support for small-scale intermediate options between nationalization and global capitalism.
¡No Pasarán! is an anthology of antifascist writing that takes up the fight against white …
Timely, wide-ranging, contemporary and near-history. I would say that Burley's interviews are most compelling, but even many of the historical context essays on Antisemitism or Empathy or TERFs or global colonial experiences are pointedly considered. Confidently closes in warning that "the insight that fascism is a recurring antagonist suggests that there can be no permanent victory over it except through the defeat of capitalism". This is a book about resisting, not defeating.
Timely, wide-ranging, contemporary and near-history. I would say that Burley's interviews are most compelling, but even many of the historical context essays on Antisemitism or Empathy or TERFs or global colonial experiences are pointedly considered. Confidently closes in warning that "the insight that fascism is a recurring antagonist suggests that there can be no permanent victory over it except through the defeat of capitalism". This is a book about resisting, not defeating.
In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a …
Articulately imagined fractured future of surveillance, cybernetic government, in intrigue and unbalanced tension. Races along many threads and plots, overall they all work, some at odds to others, dystopia best seen from a distance.