Reviews and Comments

Compelled to return to the frontlines of madness, clawing for oblivion in the face of evils and devils, a glint of compassion and sanity from another human sharing the experience. Deftly haunting storytelling.

What a delightful sprawling madcap slice of New York. Dark and funny, an overwhelming cast and set of threads and diversions. Did any of it matter? Does it voice a rosy cozy gritty 60s or grimly stubborn mid-point between southern oppression and modern violence of drugs and poverty? As recommended to me, the audiobook is an absorbing performance.

Wasteways and waste regimes, this points to larger intersectional issues of production, consumption, and political-institutional capture - but is primarily a close comparison of waste management policy in Boston & Seattle in the 1980s and 90s, focused on ultimately narrow variations in recycling programs and citizen input, and how those are compliant or resistant to our national narrative of trash.

Atmospheric, crashing ocean surf, tangled beaten bodies at the edge of land and sea. The title collection most coherent to me, the overall sense of storm-tossed black Carribean experience more than any particular line or shape.

Intrigued by the rapidly burgeoning scientific research on plant capacities, a climate journalist turns to current questions of intelligence, consciousness, and sociality. Overlaps with Franz de Waal, Donna Haraway, Future Ecologies, etc in pushing at our human-centered and exploitative perspective on the world to wonder what it would mean to consider our intellectual capacities diffused to all distant kin.

Continuing to walk and collect stories, more lovely weaving of perspectives in this one.

Oops, I proposed this again for another bookclub. Time for a re-read!

Another exploration of consciousness but compared to the fascination with developmental uplift and otherness of the previous books, this one might be emptier and denied any fuller understanding. Masterfully told again, with shifting slipping main characters and confusion's mirror to sentience' perception.

While this contains a strong critique of capitalism's powerful media, state, and military control in disregarding and exploiting labor and the environment, with a more than capable blend of 19-20c history and more recent conflicts and protest - as a book it is hard to recommend as these are straight lecture transcripts from two older men with all the rambling and "but I'll get to that in a moment" that format engenders. Read some Chomsky, but probably not this one.

Clearly describes a wide swath of current techno-capitalist surveillance and ad targeting, bias-hiding algorithmic ratings, mass and crass individualizing. I expected this to have either more historical context or sociological observation, but alas, only an academic repackaging of my feeds.

Uncategorizable and deeply examined. Elements of anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism, other ways of being and more-than-human, self-examination and introspection, personal stories of academia indigeneity and systemic harms, care and careful humility and sober reflection on our dependence on exploitation. To face and embrace modernity within yourself and in the kindest sense of hospice to sit with it through an uncertain death. If or when this is for you, strongly recommended.

A great rant on compulsory coercive educational institutions vs learning. Still entirely relevant on testing, ranking and grading, and the non-learning societal purposes of schools, but you can hear the exhaustion of repetitive railing against the system. Several inspiring models for alternative learning from specific teachers and model small institutions tucked in the middle, with that tired realism about whether education itself can center learning.

Marvelous personal stories of deep friendships that challenge and enliven how we think about care, intimacy, and partnership. "We weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them." Covers a lot of varied ground from these accounts, from growing old, to disentangling masculinity's sexualization and stigmatizing of intimacy, to friend family and co-parenting, to the grief and pain of loss of platonic love without the artificial finality of "a break-up", to the monopolization of legal rights afforded to marriage.

More bookclubbing.

Fantastical afro-detroit superhero saga referencing a thousand comics, myths, and philip k dick. Really it's too much, an explosive chromed graphic novel given all the word count of ditching the visuals, and fairly raunchily enjoyable for all that.