Reviews and Comments

loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years, 1 month ago

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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Shark Heart (2023, Scribner) 3 stars

Newlyweds face the unimaginable in this epic tale about marriage, motherhood, and enduring love.

For …

choppy

3 stars

Mixed feelings: the premised analogies for losing people and people losing themselves are well othered, and there a few sub-stories, on theater and mothers, that are heartfelt. Irked me as far from a coherent book, however.

How Infrastructure Works (2023, Penguin Publishing Group) 4 stars

A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …

the collective agency of infrastructure

4 stars

Readable tour through infrastructure's reflections of our collective cultures, in its histories, dependence on social pasts and futures, and the agency it gives us individually and en masse to reduce labor and lessen daily focus on basic needs. Maintenance and the shifting baselines of climate bring our attention now to the need and opportunity to redesign infrastructure to address a larger collective future.

Quickening (2023, Milkweed Editions) 5 stars

An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, …

beautiful

5 stars

A writer joins a research ship to Antarctica and entangles the story of climate change and polar exploration with that of pregnancy and bringing life into our future, with glaciers collapsing, with the crew and scientists lives and hopes and wonder. Beautiful.

Wave (2013, Random House Audio) 4 stars

"On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali …

Grief confronted

4 stars

Hard to recommend, hard to finish, hard to put down. Focused on the grief and guilt of surviving, with the background of the surviving and oblivious world left to imply healing and reconciliation and accommodation.

Computer power and human reason: From judgment to calculation (1976) 3 stars

a barnacled treasure

3 stars

Often rambling, ranting, and rigorous in odd measure, still a strong critique of computers-substituted-for-intelligence-AI. Computers ought not do some things we will come to believe they are capable of: through the instrumentalist and reductionist narrowing of rationality (and history) to what is computable and recordable; mistaking analogies and models of humans as information processors; and compulsive, addictive, and imperialist closing off of multiple and incommensurate perspectives.

The Light Pirate (Hardcover, 2022, Grand Central Publishing) 4 stars

Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels gradually wreak havoc …

climate and hubris and mortality

5 stars

Stunning, a climate apocalypse grounded in our current reality, that powerfully conveys a violent experience of living through a lifetime's decline in an intensely personal and local story - no boom-post-apocalypse, yet so many sharp inflections of loss and choosing between things you thought wouldn't matter til after you were gone away. It would be bizarre to call this a hopeful novel, but the undercurrent grows towards acceptance and dependence in the face of uncertainty, and it is beautifully done.

The Ministry of Time (Hardcover, 2024, Simon & Schuster) 4 stars

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and …

Perhaps a solid out-of-time romance

2 stars

I'd be curious what genre readers enjoy this, as it choppily blends historical fiction, romance, time travel, spy thriller, and reflections on genocide. Only the first two seem a strength here, and they're not my taste, but I would have settled in more easily for a slow burn romance across the last few centuries if the author hadn't kept interrupting me with the rest.

Squire (Hardcover, 2022, Quill Tree Books) 4 stars

Aiza has always dreamt of becoming a Knight. It's the highest military honor in the …

beautiful and shallow

3 stars

Did not love the individual pursuit of militaristic honor to defeat a singular evil, in a story of systemic imperial injustice. But it is a pretty and in its way empowering YA graphic novel.

Spaceman of Bohemia (2017) 3 stars

"When Jakub Procha is sent into space to examine a cosmic dust cloud covering Venus, …

Czech reaching for the stars

3 stars

What to take seriously? I am always here for spider aliens in space, and for retrospective comparisons of life under communist oppressive distrust and capitalist freewheeling distrust, and maybe for reflections on marital aspirations to common purpose or individual, and a slice of unfamiliar perspective in historical allusion... this was also a mess of a story.

Just Action (2023, Liveright Publishing Corporation) 4 stars

Richard Rothstein's 2017 best-selling book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our …

Act together to counter segregation

4 stars

Most valuable for the vignettes of small movements by individuals reaching out to neighbors, cross-town faith and community groups, city action spurred by organizing to redress and counteract the enumerated and on-going harmful effects of racial segregation.