Critiques et Commentaires

A superb musician's biography, beautifully researched threads of musicology, Detroit, influences and connections. I wasn't aware of J Dilla prior to reading, appreciated the tour of 90s and 00s performers I do recognize and the technical transitions in electronic music capability and performance expressed through JD's explorations and legacy. Wonderfully extensive supporting youtube playlist.

Well presented translation, with significant marginal notes on story differences, Icelandic allusions, and historical context for both the translation and Stoker's original.

An unfolding lighthearted mystery but with heavy themes of despair and unlikable ensemble, the intentional misdirection of each preceding chapter makes for a shaky start that settles into a reliable pacing for uplifting comic humanity.

Positive and realist, that we can maintain our progress in sustaining human-wellbeing while making the shift to ecological balance, presented in data and in evaluating what societal consumption and construction changes matter for each topic. Plenty to quibble over, some foundational, but refreshingly and necessarily post-doom.

Unfortunately, we have to wait to see if the series will finish. A return to the first book's themes, revealing more past steadily.

Develops into a new dark sidequest, the series sense of anthropological curiosity and methodological study in the face of conflicting trauma and horror really shines.

Engaging historical drama, vicious and saucy and wry, and I still just don't care about Tudor England.

Even more than I was hoping for, a thoroughly humanizing personal and anthropological narrative closely following several young Hondurans over several recent years in their own experiences of migration up and down Mexico, the relentless gang violence and poverty causing them to be stateless human smugglers, the shrinking space between state enforcement and cartel consolidation for less violent less exploitative routes.

Jumping right in to finish the series - er find out how it doesn't yet end.

Two-hour podcast interview with the author on Tin House' Between the Covers: tinhouse.com/podcast/omar-el-akkad-one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this/

Chance, sense of place in the mountain west, love, home front, racism, what can be washed away and what can be transplanted. Women-focused, twists around an expected plot, hard scenes of loss and violence, I'm not sure they add up to a great whole but has a fitting firmness and solidity.

Faced with genocide in Gaza (and a personal immigrant journey reporting on Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and more confrontations of us vs them), a sharp and painful breakup with the comfortable beliefs of liberal western democracy's morality that allow any of us to look away.

Hard, as jargon-heavy sci-fi, as violent eldritch horrors, as our unlikable unforgiving neurodiverse crew tears apart those around them, as a philosophical conclusion about consciousness, self-awareness, and artificial intelligence. It is surprising to me that I still deeply liked it on re-read.

A cozy military sci-fi. On the first hand this is a fun romp of geriatric boot camp with fun technological reveals. Fails in comparison to "The Forever War" for any confrontation with political and social impacts of the endless colonial war context. And introduces several maddeningly open-ended universal author escape hatches for the subsequent series.

Our interrelations with microbes as co-equal participants in health and evolution, from coral reefs to human microbiomes. Upturns simplifications of good and bad, of in and out, self and other, and finally made sense of metagenomics for me.