Reviews and Comments

loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years, 3 months 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.

This link opens in a pop-up window

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.

The Lost Cause (Paperback, 2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 3 stars

It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But …

excellent doctorow on near climate and political violence

3 stars

Doctorow at his strongest, ala Little Brother, didactic and engaging, young characters imagining freedom to work together on new ways to respond to current climate challenges and reactionary repression.

Solito (Paperback, 2023, Hogarth, Crown/Archetype) 4 stars

A young poet tells the story of his harrowing migration from El Salvador to the …

gripping and clear

4 stars

A child migrant story from 1999, fearfully relevant, and set in a prelude to the worst cartel and DHS aspects of today. The youthful perspective keeps much of the terror hidden, and so we experience the physical toll and chaotic uncertainty in its raw immediacy with the humanity of coyotes and older companions cast in complicated and appreciable light.

Untangled (2016) 4 stars

accomodating parenting of teen girls

4 stars

Fits a theme of parenting that recognizes kids and here teens have increasing and confusing needs to grow into adults by adding new layers of autonomy that feel like rejection and rebellion while still looking for boundaries and support - make room for their awkward developmental spurts and emotional contentions with one foot in childhood still.

Beautyland (Hardcover, english language, 2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 4 stars

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, …

hovering on the edge of not belonging

4 stars

Making sense of your place outside of the world your friends and family inhabit, or always having a reason to remain outside that world. The pace is off in a way that works, depending on how you read (or choose to elide) the ending.

Four Quartets 3 stars

Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were …

/ you say I am repeating / something i have said before. i shall say it again. /

3 stars

Linked meditations on time, the moment, the futility of striving, full of overturned binaries, overtones of religious or monastic fervor, but also not quite. The first of these, Burnt Norton, felt strongest, perhaps just more quoted.

Finding my elegy (2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Co.) 3 stars

late in the middle

3 stars

/ We make too much history / with or without us / there will be the silence /

Some wonderful lines jump out, more from the newer poems in here. Not an immediately coherent collection, on themes of death and long views and nature of course, but will revisit over the years.

/ It takes a while to learn to talk / the long language of the rock. /

Zapotec Science : Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca (2001) 4 stars

detailed crop management practices, in a monograph argument about scientific validity

4 stars

Ethnographic report from working as a fieldhand in rural Oaxaca for subsistence food and small scale cash crops, and perspective on the community relationships that non-industrial production methods create that help contextualize and contradict a western agricultural critique of efficiency and productivity.

The Outskirter's Secret (Paperback, 2017, Rosemary Kirstein) 4 stars

Determined to learn the truth about the Guidestars--two points of light that hang motionless in …

changing the perspective again

4 stars

Focus shifts from town fantasy conflict to a stranger inhospitable environment and the diffuse intense culture of survival. Some beautiful didactic bits of other ways of organizing kin and relationships, and measured plot revealing a deeper backstory.

The Shallows (2011, W. W. Norton & Company) 4 stars

“Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic …

holds up and better than I expected

4 stars

Pop history of technology and neuroscience, the mental processes of books vs media embedded in distraction, the ongoing plasticity of our minds to optimize towards what we attend to, failures of hypermedia in education and adtech-driven fragmentation of thought.