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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Combines several collections chronologically, fitting to see the constancies - place, death, seasons, working the land - and tease out the shifting tones of anger, protest, acceptance, and close attention in the raindrops: "We have all / been here before."
Adventurously broad and inventive part one of a middle grade epic - solidly action-packed sci-fi, featuring school-age protagonists struggling to save the day with mysterious baddies and aliens battling over the solar system and galaxy.
By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had …
On the one hand, this is fictive academic non-fiction, with the conceit of oral histories to make it direct and also obviate even a latent plot or characterization. On the other hand, it is communal utopia spun from our current set of dystopias, centering imagined voices young and old across a range of questions of care and process and identity and standing up together as our world came apart and we needed each other.
Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But …
Ref from Cybernetic Revolutionaries in distinguishing Beer's British psychiatric and embodied adaptation slant of cybernetics from the US military driven top-down numeric control approach.
The classic book on systems thinking―with more than half a million copies sold worldwide!
"This …
Clear and illustrative use of language shines through this (and is immediately recognizable from Limits to Growth). Really outstanding short introduction to systems thinking, why systems surprise us, and why systems thinking is also no silver bullet for control of the complex systems that make up our world. The best (and final) chapters of this book are available online www.donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ and www.donellameadows.org/dancing-with-systems/
All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of …
Incredible pace and a depth of painful experiences that beautifully if implausibly bend towards light and attempting to right wrongs when our characters break loose and are able to reflect. Despite some structural misgivings, I loved everywhere this went.
One of E. M. Forster's most celebrated novels, "A Room With a View" is the …
Smart cozy skewering of English class and respectability, old Europe's wonder and modern sensibility, flipping effortlessly between interior mental changes and a range of characters observations with the author's judgement right alongside.
Crash-landed on a desolate planet lightyears from Earth, sixteen-year-old Jessica Mathers must unravel the mystery …
Solid YA adventure, kinda a whole lot of things in here by the end though, spinning out from a well-storied premise of bodily teleportation and trust.
Touching biography, first half in Japan second in California - the life of balancing between conservative hierarchy in service and childlike wonder in welcoming mistakes. Either of these paths could be selfless or ego-driven, and either might require a deep bravery to see through.
Lamat Paed understands paradoxes. She's a great mountain climber who's never summited, the author of …
breathtaking reflection on love and betrayal in a lightly imagined world of set against an impossible mountain, lyrical and at some distance, the characters storied pasts are at times sharply filled with notoriety, at others intimately obscured in a chill fog.
Organized around several individuals' stories of intractable conflict (in local politics in California, in gang violence in Chicago, in post-rebel Colombia, in cultural exchange between US political factions) to relate to larger and smaller familiar scenes of us-vs-them in-group out-group binary simplification goaded by those who benefit from the conflict. For those looking for an answer to the larger problems, it is the same as for the smaller: active listening and complicating the narrative to give space and time for new perspectives. Yep.
Good dark YA climate fiction with a lot of danger and exploration into a recognizably collapsed society. Does not quite rise out of the rounded-off ease of YA, and the hope it offers in a future the author hopes we don't bring about is meager.
To save the future, she must return to the beginning.
Three years after her best …
Not Doctor Who & Not David Bowie get mixed up in a time travel romp in ways that don't matter much with a handful of fascinating setups and characters who never add up to as much as that promises.
From her conversation with Krista Tippett for On Being.
Takes three pervasive infrastructures and in a simple graphic treatment breaks them down in systematic detail, in historical and social context, and prompts questioning inequities and future reconsiderations of these built systems and their relationships to our global ecological society.
