Critiques et Commentaires

Last read as a kid, re-read with my daughter. Really well-paced classic swashbuckling kid-on-an-adventure, mis-steps and mutiny and murders move quickly along.

Last read as a kid, re-read with my daughter, remains a quick-paced inventive fantasy adventure, I only had to skip over a few racist descriptions. I had more fun singing the songs as an adult than they were when I was a kid, could even have used a few more!

A tumbling of traumatic scenes in hell and in university, a logical-paradox-driven magick gives as many fun revisits to mathematical puzzles as to Dante's Inferno or the Rigveda. Less convinced of the plot and character motivations, but the pace keeps up well enough.

A few wonderfully interlinked generations on Vancouver Island in catastrophic decline and re-imagining of forest.

Ghosh's non-fiction "The Great Derangement" explores the role of literary fiction in dealing with climate and colonialism, and the modern novel's turn to telling stories about the individually inwardly probable vs our condition of surprising and irrational experiences of nature and disaster. "Gun Island" is his response on climate and desperate migration, with increasingly improbable coincidence and unease challenging the protagonist's grip on scientific realism.

Not great literature! Did E.T. need this sequel? No. But for the middle grade plot and Eliot-as-a-fumbling-hormonal-pre-teen, this was a fun absurdist romp on E.T.'s home planet acting out a 1000-year-old miscreant getting "in the soup".

A challenge, a surrender. Climate change advocate becomes disenchanted with the "believe the science" dogmatic and othering polarization, wants to withdraw into a more contested, other-ways-of-knowing, art's-more-than-a-message-deliverer, science-is-also-what-got-us-here. BUT global covid response was his limit: we should be more accepting of death, too much of the book is his fears of the authoritarian-science alignment of vaccine mandates and none of the book considers the anti-science factions his discomforts are in dialog against. Another path is ahead, and he's humble in not having answers to what that is or where it goes, instead like Hospicing Modernity asks us to sit with the discomfort. Indeed.

In the range of Tchaikovsky stories, this is good but not great - our expectation of still being the last around to see the desolation of an unliveable climate is neatly confronted, and the Roadside Picnic references land, but the plot and motivation did not.

A familiar fairytale form with each turn twisted or flipped just right with a light touch.

Ambitious and did not overall work for me, although I cared more the further we went with the steady accompanying biographies unreeling the mundane and migratory unsettlings of Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu.

Something beautifully multifaceted arising from complex relations, a quantum theorist writes a clear and compact dissolution or eulogy of our understanding of time in artful conversation with ancient poets and thinkers.

The collective's introduction describes the debt-fueled consolidation and abdication of ownership in Argentina precipitating collapse in 2001; the accounts and interviews that follow reveal workers occupying their places of employment out of desperation for missed paychecks and to keep owners from stealing the equipment before bankruptcy, and finding a path in the face of violence and corruption to operate the facilities themselves, with the aid of national economic turmoil and popular support for small-scale intermediate options between nationalization and global capitalism.

Timely, wide-ranging, contemporary and near-history. I would say that Burley's interviews are most compelling, but even many of the historical context essays on Antisemitism or Empathy or TERFs or global colonial experiences are pointedly considered. Confidently closes in warning that "the insight that fascism is a recurring antagonist suggests that there can be no permanent victory over it except through the defeat of capitalism". This is a book about resisting, not defeating.

Articulately imagined fractured future of surveillance, cybernetic government, in intrigue and unbalanced tension. Races along many threads and plots, overall they all work, some at odds to others, dystopia best seen from a distance.

A first round of a life, mostly linear history centered on Gombe reserve, emphasizing care for animals, spirituality, persistence, and wonder. A pleasant read as she had a lovely meaningful life with challenges overcome gracefully.