Critiques et Commentaires

Library sent me what appears to be an original 1943 printing.

This was nice, visually engaging, girl-led, empowering, power of truth and justice in collective struggle.

A perfect blend of deep historical translation, East vs West metaphysics and cosmology, mindfulness, poetry, and walks in the woods. Seeing mind as landscape, emptying our mind like "gazing into a flawless mirror of sky", in sincerity our inner thoughts are the same as our outer thoughts.

This was a struggle, the setting and generational story of arranged marriages, domestic violence, and isolated women in strict conservative households is grounded, relevant, and sometimes well delivered. The author stand-in character really irked me in her attempts at advice, and I'm realizing it's regularly difficult for me to read average characters acting confused in the dark about well-foreshadowed violence.

Unnerving and fragmentary, very satisfying exploration around questions of memory, trust, and institutional decay.

Vivid and imaginative, crams so much in and not all of it fits but such fun. I originally read this as it was appearing wiki'd on e2, and many years later it reads much more like comic book superheroes than hard mysterious sci-fi, and that's perfectly enjoyable.

Look, this is not-a-novel and is not-sci-fi, unless we freeze and shatter those definitions - but I would read more fictive-philosophical-observational whatever this was on most any subject. There's no plot, there's hardly movement as we do just what it says at the top, circle the earth 16 times in a single day aboard the space station. Instead, we dive deeply into the human experience of Earth, family and civilization and war and politics and futures, and separation and disorientation from it all.

Survey of a life's poems, themes of loss, teaching, friendship, and freedom, a broad sweep of the American West and disappointment. Not many for me but uncluttered thinking by writing.

Oddly hilarious, actual electric sheep, and an overindulgence of layers of binaries between real and simulacra, valued and disposable, purpose and performance, without an attempt to choose sides in a dark doomed world.

A difficult read: first for a rambling conversational style that demands steady accumulation along threads of memoir, travel, genealogy, and history; second and deeply, for layering complications on The South, our senses of racism and slavery and treason and charm. Responding to current events - BLM, MeToo, Monuments - but not lingering there for long.

If you had a castle and 3500 acres intensively farmed dairy pastures and crops, and realized that wasn't sustainable, and so sought conservation funding to let it return to a wild state... this is the book is for you to rethink what wild might mean. Presents a hopeful sense that conservation and ecological repair should not be a static goal or species-specific understanding or undertaking ("this used to be wetlands, these birds are only found in closed-canopy forests") but a dynamic stepping back and observing and waiting to find out what the purpose of letting nature proceed may be.

It is hard to say easily what this directly contributes, a weaving and complication of many thinkers - Latour, Haraway, Tronto, Stengers - on care's challenges, on critique and trust-building - dissent from within - for avoiding objectification and maintenance of obligations to more than just our tribe, to more than just human relationships. Roves slowly from STS to permaculture and soil ecological timescales, full of considered light shoves and repositionings of our language and thinking.

Not sure I finished this when e2, and that was a few lifetimes back.

Potentially fascinating Hindu-inspired (?) world building of magic vs technology and struggles of commitment, betrayal, and hierarchy. A slog, where the detailing of the world and revisions to our characters understanding of it stands in for plot.