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Llaverac@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 10 months ago

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Flung Out of Space (Hardcover, 2022, Abrams, Inc.) 5 stars

A fictional and complex portrait of bestselling author Patricia Highsmith caught up in the longing …

What's your wife's name again, Eddie? Because I'd like to murder you, but I want to be sure that she hasn't called dibs first

5 stars

It was amazing?

Admittedly I love sarcastic female leads with devastating one-liners, but I really liked this book. It's a fictional take on an episode in Patricia Highsmith's life, when she was anonymously writing low-grade comics while penning what would become Strangers on a Train, followed The Price of Salt, later renamed Carol.

The muted color palette works really well here: it conveys the grayness of Patricia's life very well, between her boring jobs and the rest of the world telling her she should stop being a lesbian. An occasional pop of orange signals a rare moment of excitement, and I love how Hannah Templer renders shadows in the thriller scenes, or how she mimics old comic books style to illustrate Highsmith's stories.

There's also a little mise en abyme here, that makes us realize just how far we've come since then: the story shows a lesbian …

Unmasking Autism (Hardcover, 2022, Harmony Books) 5 stars

A deep dive into the spectrum of Autistic experience and the phenomenon of masked Autism, …

Autistics are a diverse group, though, and we don't all have to agree on which terms we like and dislike having used for ourselves. If you are Autistic, you get to decide what language works best for you. Some people prefer to say they are "on the spectrum," for example, rather than strictly Autistic. Others identify as having Asperger's, though that disorder label no longer exists, and was rooted in Hans Asperger's eugenicist research. (...)

I find it’s far more important to question the belief that supposedly “higher functioning” Autistic lives matter more than others than it is to scrub all people’s language of outdated or problematic terms. Additionally, it is vital that the disability self-advocacy community remain accessible to all people of all ability levels. That requires we extend grace and understanding to people who don’t communicate exactly the way we might like them to.

Unmasking Autism by 

The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution (Paperback, 2019, New Society Publishers) No rating

Learn how to use natural no-till systems to increase profitability, efficiency, carbon sequestration, and soil …

Tillage results in two self-perpetuating cycles: it burns up soil OM necessitating the addition of more, and it stirs up weed seeds, necessitating yet more tillage to kill the weeds. Conventional farming “solves” these two problems in a manner that is not sustainable. For depletion of organic matter, it treats the soil as a substrate for holding plants and disregards the depletion of OM. For weeds, it has herbicides.

The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution by 

There's a lot of information available for free on the Internet, but now that I've been growing food on a (very) small surface for a few years, I realize I often understood the general idea but didn't get some details that actually make this or that technique work. For instance I understood why it was important not to till, but sometimes I sowed seeds on a soil that was still too hard and could have been slightly loosened on its first centimeters and fertilized (the seeds obviously didn't grow).

I'm still at the beginning of this book but I'm glad the author aims to talk about different versions of no-till, which may or may not be adapted to the reader's situation or specific culture, goes into details, and then interviews several farmers who successfully applied these no-till techniques.