Reviews and Comments

It's not the strongest essay in here, but lovely to find Rebecca Solnit's "Abolish High School" in the middle.

Writing that conveys a mindful presence - direct, pragmatic, and unhurried - covering Buddhism's four divine attitudes - lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity in her word choice. Salzberg does a wonderful job of including personal, historical, and scriptural stories, motivating adjacent emotions and frustrations, and providing practical meditative exercises with each chapter.

Follow along with a 1968 interdisciplinary conference on society's attempted control of ecological processes, human-and-more meta-cognitive capacities, cargo cults and state machines and ... it's quite lovely, and unresolved, and a bit cringe in details. Should society be much more or much less oriented towards change? Why is it so hard for individuals to change habits of thought? How much can systems models, cybernetic language, incorporate change? The answers aren't so much as riding along the swells of debate.

Ok, here I loved the use of noir's flat abrupt characters and action to hold up the pulp fiction nature of our political response to global terrorism. Perhaps too clever in referents, but enjoyable on many levels, despite being so very flat.

How implausible that I would read this, noir about 9/11? The power of a good review from someone you trust.

A first retrospective collection at 10 years, her notes before each story are sharp and advancing even for otherwise tangent tales. And then it ends fiercely with the kicks of "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and "The Day Before The Revolution".

Such a promising disturbing start, At The Mountains of Madness vibes with new layers, and then goes on somewhere that's fine but not there.

It seems everyone read this when I lived in Chicago except me, but the true crime hook turned me off then. Turns out it's mostly about architecture and temporary facades of respectability, and engagingly told as popular history. Satisfyingly travel-back-in-time-to-Chicago.

Or, "Are we smart enough to change our behavior from a path of ecological destruction, recounting a small intellectual gathering on cybernetics in 1968”

Where I am right now, after an overlapping decades-long journey through computability, animal and ecological intelligence, finding human humility after capitalism's techno-categorizing-hubris. Seeking an answer to how technology, how participation in understanding, should adapt to a collaborative-multiple-perspective de-centering of humanity and our binary truths. This sticks to a deep middle, the claims Bridle makes for "opening up to the more-than-human world" are broad, pointed in good directions, and avoid anger or hopelessness while staying critical. My recommendations for adjacent reading would be Frans de Waal's "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are", Emma Marris' "Wild Souls", Richard Power's "The Overstory", and a lot of Ursula K LeGuin, but the bibliography has a whole stack of new reading lined up for me too.

Nice to be reminded that Chambers can weave her deeply attentive human and social reflections into compelling longer form, and live up to high expectations for unconventionally but quite comfortably answering what matters in a story or a culture.

Witty low stakes riff, not so noir - the vibe is more 5th Element romp given the cruise ship setting, and the mystery bends to suit - but true to the original in prominent stiff drinks, and comfortably egalitarian in gender roles.

This is such a satisfying wondrous summation of my last decade of reading, I love how many diverse threads are in the bibliography and new encounters in the text suggest a good year's reading project could be just to read through the rest of the bibliography. Possible overlapping new highlights there: Monica Gagliano, Suzanne Simard, Donna J Haraway, Eva Meijer, Andrea Wulf, Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

Daring to read these out of order.

Love is a willful act, to honestly commit and extend yourself to make others' conditions of growth your own. The ways our society portrays love as compatible with domination, selfishness, accumulation, and instant gratification make it harder to recognize and enact meaningful love, but we all have access to loving counter-narratives in community, friendships, religion, self-acceptance, etc.

My first hooks, a deeply well-read commentator pulling in a wide range of threads from 20c writing and her personal experiences.