Reviews and Comments

Subtle feeling mystery unraveling in a slight and mythical magic of historical China setting that meditates on friendship, vengeance, and moral obligation. Quite wonderful.

Bookclubbing.

Unsatisfying in that way that means unresolved and complicated, deftly unwhole. Many sharp edges here to trip on as the tensions balance, themes of science and religion and addiction and belief and knowing and honesty and confiding, all these tragic things with holes in the middle.

An escalating absurdity of doing nothing. Opting out of society, non-violence and coercion, office work and monotony and sanity, it goes on too long and is just right.

a good middle book, less angst but less satire, more complicated feels about genocide and cute aliens

An ecologist's popular appeal to replace lawn with native plants - echoing EO Wilson and Margaret Renkl, calling on all to set aside half for ecological conservation in a mass distributed preserve - and the broad beneficial effects of gardening for ecosystem health: grow lots of bugs to feed lots of birds and beyond.

Compact and quiet novella on the gift of empathy in hard life.

A bizarrely imaginative and gripping queer climate road novel deeply evoking its two narrative poles in Ethiopia and India, querying class and privilege and sexual violence.

Churchill and the Blitz, with source material from many ancillary characters who might have been more fascinating as the focus, which is tightly on Churchill's movements in his first year as PM. Necessarily selective while trying to add color and context from family, secretaries, and Germans, this doesn't tie up well for me but is nonetheless well written and researched.

Loved the world setting and intensity of the determined women leads in an epic murder-magic-catastrophe, though the whodunnit procedural hunt for obscured informants plodded some for me.

Madcap mashup of music theory appreciation, 80s mech battles, queer and starstruck. The first third's dry and cataclysmic wit at the end of the world shifts to a somewhat more conventional (?) military space soap opera rom com, I do wish it had kept the gay piano bar Douglas Adams vibe more prominent.

Firmly middle-grade enjoyment - exploration and unexpected encounters in a mixed-up magical wizards house and realm. The plot races in at the end thick and rapidly dispatched.

Framing the history of psychiatric definitions of normality in their origins of eugenics, racism, and capitalist to neoliberal emphasis on individual ranking and pathologizing of the ab-normal. Rounds it out with a broad view of the neurodiversity movement in response to the mass-disabling of round-the-clock capitalist consumerist desires and inequalities.

Satisfyingly grim and consequential build-up to a cataclysmic conflict between gods-reborn wraps up these threads nicely.

Written after Occupy and before 2016 with deep appreciation for the economic inequality and carceral injustice pushing the US towards internal conflict, this reflects a non-violent realism about rebellion, repression, and vigilante-fascist state outcomes with historical analysis interviews - many from prison - with Black Panther, ANC, Nazi resistance, US whistleblowers, and Occupy activists.