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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Near-future realist dystopia pushes family decisions up against absolutes... and these characters fail to live up to the awkward narrative tangle Ng puts them in. Changes on many levels could have made this an important book, but it ends up not mattering.
Stunning for her daring originality, the author of Negroland gives us what she calls "a …
Clever capable blend of fluid media crit and autobiography to waltz from personal memory to cultural memory and back again.
This eagerly awaited non-fiction debut by acclaimed Native environmental activist Winona LaDuke is a thoughtful …
Each chapter visits a US indigenous community in crises created and sustained by poisoning the land (and the people), stealing the land (and the people), and questions our capitalist colonial framework that imagines it is just to set a "fair" price (often explicitly insultingly low) for the destruction of a way of living for all time.
Thoroughly grim and unredemptive, there are some beautifully evoked unpleasant truths in people's minds here, but I can't recommend reading them.
On a warm March night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to a warning of unknown …
Does a lovely job portraying a decentralized, nerdy, queer, ecologically-attentive near future both recognizable and made deeply alien through first-contact... even as a semi-utopic didactic depiction, I wish it were a better story, the stakes and conflicts wobble erratically between gray and absolute to an overall weaker place.
A solid early start, tying Ahab's totalitarianism to American capitalism and the neurotic disassociation it produces in the intellectual class and middle management. As it spins out to broader Melville background and comparative lit, I cared less.
A low-stakes nonsensical romp in the hallways and discipline strictures of a Soviet research university... a wonderful blend of Pratchett and Vonnegut.
etizens, one of the first books detailing the Internet, looks at the creation and development …
An uneven and hopeful set of essays on the history and promise of Usenet as a democratizing and generative space for global discussion. The pre-history of ARPAnet is valuable and inspiring, as is the central warning that coming commercial control and influence would distort and reduce the forms of communication from creatively sparking new ideas through conversations to merely consuming information.
An effective thematic collection of essays (1975-2011) that aren't too repetitive and yet each stands alone well, arguing from an anti-exploitation feminist perspective for housework and carework to a) be recognized as an unpaid foundation of capitalist society, b) organize and refuse being atomized and devalued under this society - from rejecting earlier feminist/leftist legitimizing of only workforce participation to globalization's outsourcing and industrializing of the home, and c) be understood as a collective social responsibility integrally valued in reproducing the society we want. A lifetime's vibrant perspective.
Ubik, written in 1966 and published in 1969, is one of Philip K. Dick's masterpieces …
Sharp satire about hubris and business and PKD's mind-bending doubts about what is real and what is in your mind quite explicit here, aged better than most things of this era... and I ultimately didn't care much about where the story went.
In "With a Daughter's Eye," writer and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson looks back on …
Capable biographical memoir, intentionally capturing her personal insights into her parents lives and the varying ways they sought patterns of meaning in the world around them. Both of them are more interesting to me now, and the habits of introspection and analysis they openly developed in their daughter shine through here.
The Thin Man (1934) is a detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, originally published in the …
Cinematic whodunnit, some of the turns from dialog to narrated action here are wonderfully written, I might watch the movie, but I'm ready to admit that noir fiction's male navel gazing is not my reading pleasure.
Feminism in rejecting or reversing society's roles in Muslim India 1900... wasn't for me.
In this business classic—now with a new Afterword in which the author draws parallels to …
Lessons to be learned about hubris and mathematically-backed ideological confidence, Wall Street's internal FOMO and ruthlessness, and just general foolishness. Diversification is misleading when all the same investors are in all the same markets. Title is unsupported in this narrative, there's little genius on display here, and suffers somewhat for being written so soon after the event. The details are clear after 50 pages, followed by a lot of blow-by-blow.
"While vacationing at the beach with her mother, Sasha Samokhina meets the mysterious Farit Kozhennikov …
Interplay of subtle and disturbing otherworldly moments to capture so recognizably the transition from high school to college and the variety of struggles to grasp advanced subjects' - maybe math, maybe language, maybe psychology or sociology - beauty and explanatory power.