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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Young love is pitted against social discrimination in Perumal Murugan’s powerful and compelling novel, set …
Dark interior struggles of a young couple, conflict over marriage and family obligation, heat and desperation in poor rural Tamil life.
Clara Gutierrez is a highly-skilled technician specializing in the popular 'Raise' AI companions. Her childhood …
Quiet novella on aging and conscientious care and consent - two careful characters, used to dissimilar routine, find joyful surprise in the other.
Time, the fundamental dimension of our existence, has fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists of every …
Time is a population-level phenomenon, physics that has focused on integrable time-reversible solutions has discounted the aspects of dynamics that help us understand self-organization, creativity, and life, all bound up with the chaotic entropic uncertainty that time's arrow creates. As expected even in this "pop" treatment there's a lot of math I'm ill-suited to evaluate.
Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf—and fifty years after the translation that …
The "Bro!" translation, less rudely modernizing than you'd think, a joyous and hilarious full sweep of English language in all its boastful vigilant possibilities.
Wilson’s Odyssey captures the beauty and enchantment of this ancient poem as well as the …
A lovely plain and readable translation, I'd entirely forgotten how much the story is of human hospitality, deceit and its dangers when surrounded by capricious gods. Even arriving home, the ancient Greece portrayed is far and foreign from us.
Time, the fundamental dimension of our existence, has fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists of every …
This will probably fly over my head, but it's a common ground from Donna Haraway to Bruce Sterling, and it's due back at the library in a few weeks.
From science fiction visionary Annalee Newitz comes The Terraformers, a sweeping, uplifting, and illuminating exploration …
Content warning tangent dragging the audiobook too
The audiobook makes a particular choice to use sound effect clips whenever a character makes sound effects, which is often in parts, and which added a flat layer of realism/annoyance of a radio play dramatization performed with a 90s DJ's sample effects board of sad trombone and fart noises. I think whether you'll like this is independent of whether you'll like the book, but it may have influenced my take.
From science fiction visionary Annalee Newitz comes The Terraformers, a sweeping, uplifting, and illuminating exploration …
Plenty to like here in environmental, more-than-human kin, queer and anti-capitalist themes in a fairly comic presentation. And yet it's really off as a paced story, as characters jut in or out or beep past, or as a deeply considered world or future confronting injustice, and the incoherence just built for me as emotions rose towards the end.
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A well-worked short study (with a dated feel) in ego-dissolution and recognizing our individualistic society's contradicting double-binds in defining progress, freedom, and love. Better to dance as one with the universe, but watch out for all the ways attempting to do so reinstates your sense of self...
A time capsule of vibrant youth-centered journalism: three sections of short articles, Science Reporting, Youth Activism, and Global Intersectionality. All these kids are growing old now.
Journalist memoir, revealing and honest and Phillipines-focused to frame global problems. The middle section is the strongest, in angrily recounting how Facebook actively sided with power rather than pro-social possibilities in 2011-2018. Hope for reclaiming shared bottom-up truth over loud loyalty of media to power is always ... possible.
In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative …
What a joyful blending and interweaving of feminist, more-than-human, art-science-speculation, and anger at capitalism's depletion of our capacity to think in relational terms.
"The anthropocene is more of a boundary event than an epoch ... what comes after will not be like what came before. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge."
Trust Kids! weaves together essays, interviews, poems, and artwork from scholars, activists, and artists about …
If we want a world without domination, how do we rethink our relations with kids? Collection of connected authors of all ages recollections and motivations in unschooling, alternative schooling, and living as and with kids as trusted peers.
Challenging for me, "woo" and crossing boundaries [useful heuristic? paternalistic?] between personal motivation, scientific narratives and orthodoxies, while also carefully keeping the wild claims to memoir not her recounting of study results. Rather than dismiss "trip reports" as problematic genesis for scientific inquiry, I'm going to just sit with my discomfort and listen.
Unexpected turns and comfort in life's complexities in this love letter from London to Florence.