Critiques et Commentaires

Moves at different paces and levels, queer and deterministic and surreal by degrees, but somehow flat to me.

Family, migration, survival, the power of poverty and coercion and being outsiders. Koreans in Japan, 20c. The depth of family complexity flattened to a hyphen in immigrant labels like "Korean-American".

A cute techno-thriller, this time focused on an aging retiring accountant rather than a YA scene, and the usual cogent and analytical depictions of today's hyped technologies and social implications. In this case, when money is no object, which cheapens most of the choices.

Short novel of imagined collective non-hierarchical resistance to imperial war. Reminiscent of For Whom The Bell Tolls, but in this case I wish the central plot were not one of war and violence.

A beautiful post-solarpunk visual treatment squashed into a nearly recognizable abrupt retelling of the Count that had little room to match up to the setting transplantation and so hardly bothers.

In ways juvenile, clumsy, and space-adventure-intrigue-rific ala Heinlein, also vivid and inventive and anti-provincial anti-capitalist. Mostly.

By now well-covered only-so-popularizable territory of special relativity, black holes, expanding universe, quantum mechanics, anthropic principle, string theory, and does a reasonable job of remaining humble while inquisitive about the parts that might have no answer.

Less revelatory than her How To Do Nothing or Bridle's Ways of Being, the intent is there to re-examine the colonial capitalist and puritan influences on time's central role in living - our drive for efficiency, self-improvement, fixed hours and seasons - but even if the message is to de-focus, this is a scattered book. "The point isn't to live more, to but to be more alive in any given moment."

Brief account by involved journalist of campaigning to save 200ac of old growth pines in the Keweenaw, raising local and state public awareness, negotiating and pressuring company and federal interests towards the goal of preservation, and encountering the natural wonder of the big tree ecosystem.

Benedictines encounter Buddhists over the 20c and debate how to live hospitably in the world and balance a transition from monastic to missionary to peace-building. "The risk of religious isolation from dialogue is fundamentalism; to be religious is to be interreligious." Real peace is sustained encounter, not diplomatic negotiation.

Goes from uncomfortable to weird to unsatisfying - probably best read as satire, with some comic excellence, but oof.

My father left this for me to pick up, as he does. Niche.

Has the environmental movement shifted its goals from saving the earth's biodiversity, creatures, healthy ecosystems etc to arguing instead for the much-less-contentious saving of human industrial civilization with "green technology" promises of convenience, continued extraction, and ecological depletion? The book is a bit heavy on bashing the myths contained in how solar, hydro, recycling, cities, etc are not solutions to the root causes of extractive industrial consumptive convenience, but fair enough. Save life on earth, or save industrial civilization? It's a bit of a false bind, but it's also important to see when options marketed as "environmentally friendly" are mostly friendly to our continued inaction.

The mystery is fine, but the light amusement of the amateur sleuth and his enjoyment at his own cleverness in figuring it out all along the way is deftly delivered.

Constantly unexpected novel - or an early AI-written contender? - filled with absurdist characters plumbing the depths of lunch-time philosophizing about grief, art, and life.