User Profile

loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years, 11 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

Currently Reading

2025 Reading Goal

97% complete! loppear has read 78 of 80 books.

Lavaca Collective: Sin Patrón (Paperback, 2007, Haymarket Books)

collective labor

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.

Shane Burley: ¡No Pasarán! (2022, AK Press Distribution)

¡No Pasarán! is an anthology of antifascist writing that takes up the fight against white …

rich collection of anti-fascist essays and interviews

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.

Ray Nayler: Where the Axe Is Buried (2025, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a …

political/philosophical thriller

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.

reviewed Reason for Hope by Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall, Phillip Berman: Reason for Hope (Hardcover, 2000, Thorndike Press)

Dr. Jane Goodall's revolutionary study of chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe preserve forever altered the very, …

chose to read her earlier memoir, though her work later continued to live the title

A first round of a life, mostly linear history centered on Gombe reserve, emphasizing care for animals, spirituality, persistence, and wonder. A pleasant read as she had a lovely meaningful life with challenges overcome gracefully.

Sunaura Taylor: Beasts of burden (2017)

reclaiming care for animals x disability

Some excellent positive essays here, finding commonalities and expanded ground for disability and animal rights. Mostly personal reflections on burdens of care and dependency, claiming animality, and analogies between ableism/normalcy and vegan/natural and Singer-rebutting (hence "Animal Liberation") questions of hierarchies of harms and biases. Other ways of knowing, other ways of being, and our common need for diverse accommodations in inter-dependence with other beings.

Marina & Sergey Dyachenko, Julia Meitov Hersey: School of Shards (2025, HarperCollins Publishers)

The haunting final chapter of the modern classic Vita Nostra trilogy. The Dyachenkos’ magical dark …

a fine ending

Echoes the strengths of the first book's story line, satisfying tearing apart and struggling to hold on, but the mystery and terror are harder to return to.