Reviews and Comments

So good to return to these deeply considered illuminations of human problem space.

Revisiting some Culture, thanks for the reminder @sam@books.theunseen.city

Revenge across all time and reason, swashbuckling adventure and escape, twisted double-crossing. And good literary feel in many borrowed and emphasized lines and themes, a fantastic sci-fi homage to The Count Of Monte Cristo.

Despite the entertainment of fully immiserating an Elon-esque failson, along with wealth and war and human timescales of happiness, the misogyny is heavy and the plot is pointlessly dulled along the way. Can't all be winners.

Entertaining YA-adjacent fantasy adventure, enjoyable magic and plot twists at a steady pace, and an earnest girl lead acting thoroughly considerately and boldly.

Wonderfully contrived to make you care about what horror the dislikable narrator will justify next, in a savage and very online swipe at publishing, representation, and authorship.

Lit novel of chosen family support for self-determination, in trans and in revolt, with a tinge of speculative fic background and an arms-length from the action, taking place as much in the kitchen and studio as the streets. I loved this for the care and openhearted family dynamics, even though everything in the story is triggering trauma and violence, it is a warm story.

Accounts and reflection, mostly personally connected to the author's global Buddhist peacemaking journey, of deeply lived altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, and engagement (her organizing terms) that are central to ethical life but risk becoming all-consuming and counter-destructive at the extremes. Care and freedom for all is inseparable from care for oneself.

Good parts are Rushdie's imaginings, mental literary meanderings, and gallows humor. Would have been fine as a long-form article, a love letter to his new wife and to aging's difficulties healing, touches only briefly on the regret of still being better known for his tragedies than for his books.

Absolute riotous satire at the expense of the irrationality of men, art, war, and violence.

Religion, aristocracy and patriarchy, environmental hubris, loss of tradition, loss of control, loss of mind - unsettling uncanny angles pile up to a dramatic peak here, unsurprisingly not exactly satisfying but inventive and powerful.

An approachable focused survey on receiving and living the precepts in the American Soto Zen lineage, interconnecting the refuges and precepts with commentary.

In Solnit's delightful way, chapter essays bound between slices of Orwell's biography and bibliography and social commentary on the role of roses, labor, beauty, colonialism, and fascism's conflicts with truth and language. As these are pervasive themes for Orwell too, the ground is plentiful for analysis, all brought back to earth in the garden.

Outstanding journalist's history of 2010s protests and mass-media enabled uprisings, covering Arab Spring, Brasil & Chile, Hong Kong, and Ukraine. Using first-hand accounts and succinct late 20th-century local and global context about what power dynamics came before for each case study, this follows the movements in the streets and the outcomes over subsequent years. Ultimately challenges the narratives of horizontalism, leaderless movements, and corporate-tech-mediated uprisings as a path for change, with particular focus on co-opting of the same by right-wing elements and a need to pragmatically account for what power will fill the vacuum once regimes are toppled to realize any popular demands.

An intimate family saga of Palestinian diaspora, comfortably middle-class non-participants in every conflict that touches them, forced to flee and always outsiders in their moves for family and safety through the Middle East Arab world. Lovingly rendered, looking back, looking for peace.