User Profile

loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 6 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 (View all 5)

2024 Reading Goal

54% complete! loppear has read 49 of 90 books.

Joseph Weizenbaum: Computer power and human reason (1976, W. H. Freeman) 4 stars

Computer Power and Human Reason is a distinguished computer scientist's elucidation of the impact of …

a barnacled treasure

3 stars

Often rambling, ranting, and rigorous in odd measure, still a strong critique of computers-substituted-for-intelligence-AI. Computers ought not do some things we will come to believe they are capable of: through the instrumentalist and reductionist narrowing of rationality (and history) to what is computable and recordable; mistaking analogies and models of humans as information processors; and compulsive, addictive, and imperialist closing off of multiple and incommensurate perspectives.

reviewed Nocilla dream by Agustín Fernández Mallo (Narrativa / Candaya -- 6)

Agustín Fernández Mallo: Nocilla dream (Spanish language, 2006, Editorial Candaya) 5 stars

A very clever little book. It somehow manages to be incredibly compelling, possibly by tricking …

a compellng oddball

4 stars

The early 2000s, fractured implied narrative in short scenes set in Nevada's bleakness, in global trade's corners, in conceptual micronationality, in the simultaneous confidence in and impermanence of technology.

Lily Brooks-Dalton: The Light Pirate (Hardcover, 2022, Grand Central Publishing) 4 stars

Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels gradually wreak havoc …

climate and hubris and mortality

5 stars

Stunning, a climate apocalypse grounded in our current reality, that powerfully conveys a violent experience of living through a lifetime's decline in an intensely personal and local story - no boom-post-apocalypse, yet so many sharp inflections of loss and choosing between things you thought wouldn't matter til after you were gone away. It would be bizarre to call this a hopeful novel, but the undercurrent grows towards acceptance and dependence in the face of uncertainty, and it is beautifully done.

Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry of Time (2024, Simon & Schuster) 4 stars

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and …

Perhaps a solid out-of-time romance

2 stars

I'd be curious what genre readers enjoy this, as it choppily blends historical fiction, romance, time travel, spy thriller, and reflections on genocide. Only the first two seem a strength here, and they're not my taste, but I would have settled in more easily for a slow burn romance across the last few centuries if the author hadn't kept interrupting me with the rest.

Sara Alfageeh, Nadia Shammas: Squire (Hardcover, 2022, Quill Tree Books) 4 stars

Aiza has always dreamt of becoming a Knight. It's the highest military honor in the …

beautiful and shallow

3 stars

Did not love the individual pursuit of militaristic honor to defeat a singular evil, in a story of systemic imperial injustice. But it is a pretty and in its way empowering YA graphic novel.

Jaroslav Kalfar: Spaceman of Bohemia (2017) 3 stars

"When Jakub Procha is sent into space to examine a cosmic dust cloud covering Venus, …

Czech reaching for the stars

3 stars

What to take seriously? I am always here for spider aliens in space, and for retrospective comparisons of life under communist oppressive distrust and capitalist freewheeling distrust, and maybe for reflections on marital aspirations to common purpose or individual, and a slice of unfamiliar perspective in historical allusion... this was also a mess of a story.

Richard Rothstein, Leah Rothstein: Just Action (2023, Liveright Publishing Corporation) 4 stars

Richard Rothstein's 2017 best-selling book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our …

Act together to counter segregation

4 stars

Most valuable for the vignettes of small movements by individuals reaching out to neighbors, cross-town faith and community groups, city action spurred by organizing to redress and counteract the enumerated and on-going harmful effects of racial segregation.