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Sally Strange

SallyStrange@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 9 months ago

Interests: climate, science, sci-fi, fantasy, LGBTQIA+, history, anarchism, anti-racism, labor politics

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Sally Strange's books

Currently Reading (View all 5)

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Yangsze Choo: The Fox Wife (Hardcover, 2024, Henry Holt & Company) 4 stars

'Vivid, enigmatic, enchanting' M. L. Rio 'Irresistible' Sunday Times

Some people think foxes go around …

a pervasive metaphorical mood of foxes and snow

4 stars

Subtle feeling mystery unraveling in a slight and mythical magic of historical China setting that meditates on friendship, vengeance, and moral obligation. Quite wonderful.

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Laozi, Ken Liu: Laozi's Dao de Jing (2024, Scribner) 4 stars

spare translation

4 stars

Nicely elucidated clear translation, compared to others there's nothing florid and mostly less poetic (reading alongside LeGuin's equally spare version in particular here), interspersed with short essays on commentary, lived experience, and the translator's challenges for a text so embedded in culture and so dismissive of language as a way to approach Dao.

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finished reading Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch, #1)

Ann Leckie: Ancillary Justice (Paperback, 2013, Orbit Books) 4 stars

On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing …

Content warning Anaander Mianaai

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David Graeber: The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World ... (2024, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 3 stars

A collection of David Graeber's essays in a book.

Points out the obvious that no one is noticing

5 stars

( em português: sol2070.in/2025/04/livro-david-graeber-ultimate-hidden-truth/ )

”The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...” (2024, 384 pgs) brings together articles and interviews by anarchist anthropologist David Graeber.

Anyone who enjoys his thought-provoking work will be delighted. With his characteristic perspicacity, which points out the obvious that no one is noticing, he touches on diverse topics — such as the economy, inequality, the cultural landscape, altruism, the politics of hatred, etc — in which each article could be the starting point to an entire book.

On the other hand, some articles condense central themes from his most influential works, such as “The Dawn of Everything”, “Debt” and “Bullshit Jobs”. Some were the germs that gave rise to the books; others are developments with recapitulation.

The title of the collection, “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World”, refers to the theme that runs through some of the articles and is also at the heart …

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reviewed The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem: The Arrest (2020, Ecco Press, Ecco) 4 stars

Scifi novel about the production and consumption of scifi stories

5 stars

It was both fascinating and frustrating in parts. In the end, the fascination came out ahead.

Fascinating: thinking about how a small town self-governs without a formal government. There was a mayor in East Tinderwick Maine, where all the action takes place, before technology stopped working (in an event called "the Arrest," hence the name of the book), but she just stopped being the mayor and started making baskets (or something, I forget) instead. The town is on a peninsula, and they have an uneasy bargain with a group of semi-nomadic folks who accept their food in return for keeping outsiders from invading.

Frustrating: the main character, Journeyman. He's in Maine because he was visiting his sister when the Arrest happened. Before that, he was living in LA working as a writer, but only ever on other people's scripts and ideas. He is perpetually ignorant, indecisive, drifting and weightless. He …

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Yoko Ogawa: The Memory Police (Paperback, 2020, Penguin Random House) 4 stars

A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance.

On an unnamed island off …

The politics of deleting and disappearing

No rating

The concept of this book was probably more interesting to me than the narrative itself, but the way it deals with the policing of memory is interesting, especially when that process leads to its logical end.