Reviews and Comments

loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years, 1 month 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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Knife (AudiobookFormat, 2024, Books on Tape) 4 stars

From Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt …

cathartic for him

3 stars

Good parts are Rushdie's imaginings, mental literary meanderings, and gallows humor. Would have been fine as a long-form article, a love letter to his new wife and to aging's difficulties healing, touches only briefly on the regret of still being better known for his tragedies than for his books.

Grass (Paperback, 1993, Spectra) 4 stars

Generations ago, humans fled to the cosmic anomaly known as Grass. But before humanity arrived, …

unexpected other-sci-fi

4 stars

Religion, aristocracy and patriarchy, environmental hubris, loss of tradition, loss of control, loss of mind - unsettling uncanny angles pile up to a dramatic peak here, unsurprisingly not exactly satisfying but inventive and powerful.

Orwell’s Roses (Paperback, 2021, Granta) 4 stars

“In the year 1936 a writer planted roses.” So begins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a …

pleasant inquiry in botanically-tinged biography

4 stars

In Solnit's delightful way, chapter essays bound between slices of Orwell's biography and bibliography and social commentary on the role of roses, labor, beauty, colonialism, and fascism's conflicts with truth and language. As these are pervasive themes for Orwell too, the ground is plentiful for analysis, all brought back to earth in the garden.

reviewed If We Burn by Vincent Bevins

If We Burn (Hardcover, 2023, PublicAffairs) 5 stars

The story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world — and what …

a decade of non-US protest, to what ends?

5 stars

Outstanding journalist's history of 2010s protests and mass-media enabled uprisings, covering Arab Spring, Brasil & Chile, Hong Kong, and Ukraine. Using first-hand accounts and succinct late 20th-century local and global context about what power dynamics came before for each case study, this follows the movements in the streets and the outcomes over subsequent years. Ultimately challenges the narratives of horizontalism, leaderless movements, and corporate-tech-mediated uprisings as a path for change, with particular focus on co-opting of the same by right-wing elements and a need to pragmatically account for what power will fill the vacuum once regimes are toppled to realize any popular demands.

Salt houses (2017) 4 stars

"From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between …

always at a remove

4 stars

An intimate family saga of Palestinian diaspora, comfortably middle-class non-participants in every conflict that touches them, forced to flee and always outsiders in their moves for family and safety through the Middle East Arab world. Lovingly rendered, looking back, looking for peace.

Intermezzo (Hardcover, english language, 2024, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 4 stars

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have …

inwardly tense and sex-filled

4 stars

Marvelous capture of two brothers coming to understand themselves better through emotional and sexual relationships they judge themselves over and fear society and family and each other will judge them too. The characters are mostly loving, worried, and care-free - without the demands of care (their father has recently passed; there are only adult children here), they are free to be lost about what love is for most of the book.

Julia: A Novel (2023, Granta Books) 4 stars

An imaginative, feminist, and brilliantly relevant-to-today retelling of Orwell’s 1984, from the point of view …

uncomfortably real and worthwhile

4 stars

A thorough re-shaping of 1984, the fear and hate in authoritarian distrust remains centered from this more sympathetic and capable and resourceful perspective, with welcome nuance and complications as hope and care slip in and out of reach.

Invisible Women (Hardcover, 2019, Harry N. Abrams) 3 stars

Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and …

frustrating on the surface and in depth

3 stars

On the one hand this is clear and infuriating, a wide ranging look at how male-as-default, often unquestioned or under-researched, in infrastructure, transportation, medicine, employment and care and GDP, etc, makes the world much worse for women and also for everyone. Yet the book speaks of women almost entirely as a monolithic global whole - slight mentions of hormonal or racial complications, but basically no intersectional or queer consideration. As the author is often asking for better nuanced and dis-aggregated data analysis on this single important binary, we could use a version of this book that took that conclusion to a full embrace of considered complicated no-simple-norms human society.

Death of the Author (William Morrow) 2 stars

The future of storytelling is here.

Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing …

Didn't love much about this.

2 stars

Strong potential in near future Nigerian/American family tensions of over fame and disability, Chicago and African settings, interwoven with a further out robot society facing human-like challenges of witnessing cataclysm. And large parts, especially the more painful, feel like and are author-memoir. So disappointing to dislike most of the characters and their overall arcs, through accident and levels of seeking independence.

Master Slave Husband Wife (Hardcover, 2023, 37 Ink) 3 stars

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William …

a good bookclub discussion

3 stars

Locally-connected story of escape from slavery in Georgia and public life on the abolition circuit in Massachusetts and England. While there are many moments of intrigue and risk, the somewhat dry telling is well-riddled by neatly connected reminders of slavery's implications in wealth everywhere they travel, and the novelty of the 'white slave' in drawing abolitionist crowds repeatedly highlights the deep veins of racism and misogyny even in those risking more or less to end slavery.

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.

The Wild Iris (1993, Ecco Press) 4 stars

From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, a stunningly beautiful collection of poems that encompasses the …

bounding between the dirt and the heavens

4 stars

Spiritually infused poetry that slips between weeds in the garden and fleeting seasons and omniscient conversation beyond these bounds to ask of life in the crevices.