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loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years, 3 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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Soldiers and Kings (2024, Penguin Publishing Group) 5 stars

An intense, intimate and first-of-its-kind look at the world of human smuggling in Latin America, …

incredible, grim and vibrant.

5 stars

Even more than I was hoping for, a thoroughly humanizing personal and anthropological narrative closely following several young Hondurans over several recent years in their own experiences of migration up and down Mexico, the relentless gang violence and poverty causing them to be stateless human smugglers, the shrinking space between state enforcement and cartel consolidation for less violent less exploitative routes.

Go As a River (2023, Spiegel & Grau LLC) 3 stars

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Set amid Colorado’s wild beauty, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story of a resilient young …

solid 1950s western novel

3 stars

Chance, sense of place in the mountain west, love, home front, racism, what can be washed away and what can be transplanted. Women-focused, twists around an expected plot, hard scenes of loss and violence, I'm not sure they add up to a great whole but has a fitting firmness and solidity.

Blindsight (2008, Tor Books) 4 stars

Two months since the stars fell...

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around …

hard

4 stars

Hard, as jargon-heavy sci-fi, as violent eldritch horrors, as our unlikable unforgiving neurodiverse crew tears apart those around them, as a philosophical conclusion about consciousness, self-awareness, and artificial intelligence. It is surprising to me that I still deeply liked it on re-read.

Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1) (2007) 4 stars

John Scalzi channels Robert Heinlein (including a wry sense of humor) in a novel about …

meh

2 stars

A cozy military sci-fi. On the first hand this is a fun romp of geriatric boot camp with fun technological reveals. Fails in comparison to "The Forever War" for any confrontation with political and social impacts of the endless colonial war context. And introduces several maddeningly open-ended universal author escape hatches for the subsequent series.

I Contain Multitudes (EBook, 2016, Ecco) 5 stars

From Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong, a groundbreaking, wondrously informative, and vastly entertaining examination of …

the complications of microbiology

5 stars

Our interrelations with microbes as co-equal participants in health and evolution, from coral reefs to human microbiomes. Upturns simplifications of good and bad, of in and out, self and other, and finally made sense of metagenomics for me.