Reviews and Comments

A thorough re-shaping of 1984, the fear and hate in authoritarian distrust remains centered from this more sympathetic and capable and resourceful perspective, with welcome nuance and complications as hope and care slip in and out of reach.

On the one hand this is clear and infuriating, a wide ranging look at how male-as-default, often unquestioned or under-researched, in infrastructure, transportation, medicine, employment and care and GDP, etc, makes the world much worse for women and also for everyone. Yet the book speaks of women almost entirely as a monolithic global whole - slight mentions of hormonal or racial complications, but basically no intersectional or queer consideration. As the author is often asking for better nuanced and dis-aggregated data analysis on this single important binary, we could use a version of this book that took that conclusion to a full embrace of considered complicated no-simple-norms human society.

Strong potential in near future Nigerian/American family tensions of over fame and disability, Chicago and African settings, interwoven with a further out robot society facing human-like challenges of witnessing cataclysm. And large parts, especially the more painful, feel like and are author-memoir. So disappointing to dislike most of the characters and their overall arcs, through accident and levels of seeking independence.

Locally-connected story of escape from slavery in Georgia and public life on the abolition circuit in Massachusetts and England. While there are many moments of intrigue and risk, the somewhat dry telling is well-riddled by neatly connected reminders of slavery's implications in wealth everywhere they travel, and the novelty of the 'white slave' in drawing abolitionist crowds repeatedly highlights the deep veins of racism and misogyny even in those risking more or less to end slavery.

Nicely elucidated clear translation, compared to others there's nothing florid and mostly less poetic (reading alongside LeGuin's equally spare version in particular here), interspersed with short essays on commentary, lived experience, and the translator's challenges for a text so embedded in culture and so dismissive of language as a way to approach Dao.

Covers familiar ground of critiquing particular views of conservation baselines and biases in a deeply-human-entwined view of nature, a complex world left room to be complicated. Not as strong as her later Wild Souls, or Tree's Wilding.

Spiritually infused poetry that slips between weeds in the garden and fleeting seasons and omniscient conversation beyond these bounds to ask of life in the crevices.

Subtle feeling mystery unraveling in a slight and mythical magic of historical China setting that meditates on friendship, vengeance, and moral obligation. Quite wonderful.

Bookclubbing.

Reminiscent of Monk and Robot though broader and darker, we're along for a calm inquisitive road novel with an earnest robot butler some moment after the world as they and we know it ended. Satirically enjoys itself in upending formulaic scenes and takes us to some imaginative places, surprisingly light fun.

A deep intimate consideration of racialized poverty outside of Chicago in the 1970s, entirely recognizable today for the structural inequalities in how generations continue to "fail" to make it in American society and how they cope by sharing, swapping, and delaying relations of obligation to create networks of care and kin that redefine still-current ideas of family bonds. Beyond the central non-judgemental shift in understanding the networks of domestic care in circumstances where neither individual nor family resources are adequate to survival, I was struck by how the dependent and mutual relationships of poverty echo the communitarian and degrowth goals of decentering the nuclear family, making do with less together, of giving more than you have in mutual obligation to your neighbors, and how class fear of poverty and interdependence are obstacles to reaching out to each other.

Well handled familiar alternation between animal facts - the mysterious for millenia and perhaps still now lifecycle of eels from the Sargasso Sea to freshwater streams and back - epistemology - eels role in slow scientific discovery and in fear and myth as a way of knowing - and memoir - growing up fishing for eels with his father, cultural foodways and facing fears and unknowns, late in life family revelations.

Compact and quiet novella on the gift of empathy in hard life.

A bizarrely imaginative and gripping queer climate road novel deeply evoking its two narrative poles in Ethiopia and India, querying class and privilege and sexual violence.

Churchill and the Blitz, with source material from many ancillary characters who might have been more fascinating as the focus, which is tightly on Churchill's movements in his first year as PM. Necessarily selective while trying to add color and context from family, secretaries, and Germans, this doesn't tie up well for me but is nonetheless well written and researched.