Critiques et Commentaires

A pop update to the author's more academic Surfing Uncertainty on the predictive processing view of consciousness, with most of those details in a brief appendix and the focus on cognitive study examples, cognitive biases and confusions that seem clearer when viewed through this lens, and ways to think of our predictive brains as embodied and extended in the world.

Short stories from animals perspective in their relation to humans amid catastrophe. Opens and ends strongly, sombre and reflective but lacking a punch for me.

A not-quite introduction to Zen, the wonder and presence of what is already familiar and immediate, studied closely from a position of openness without the goal of attaining anything. Compiled from short talks and given structure starting from practice and form, to attitudes and feeling, to understanding and mindset, around again to "true understanding is practice itself".

How can men be so crass, so misogynistic, so violent, when transplanted to the extreme environs of capitalist extraction far from anyplace recognizable as home? Documentary reflection after anguished disillusion and mistreatment, drolly told.

Connection to the garden, to earth, to rock, a broad set of essays entangling poetry, place, transplanted species, indigenous women's voices, community agriculture, global dialog. Only a few of the author's own poem fragments moved me, but his selection of literature and context and experience works to shape a dependent view of the world.

Poverty abolitionism. Blends description of the exploitative two-tier society we all participate in, earnest responses to socioeconomic myths about destitution and welfare, and policy possibilities for undoing the ways society and government actively perpetuates both wealth and poverty.

Light and easy, digs at questions of family and relationship and acceptance of our pasts. The narrowly defined and mysterious time travel is central and structuring, but also somehow gets out of the way for interesting main characters to develop.

Lyrically wends from suburban pollinator garden to covid-19 to #BLM to the erasure and solitariness of nature writing contrasted to community's ebb and flow in ecology, community's creation and destruction in society.

Fast-paced and high-stakes near-YA with a long list of honestly addressed CW themes (sexual violence, gun violence, drug use, indigenous justice and casino wealth and federal bureau myopia, family estrangement, i could go on). The protagonist is drawn so smartly and self-aware on the boundaries of tribe, adulthood, hockey, love, family.

A primer on colonial exploitation around the opium wars, and the conflicts of allegiance for our young scholars of color at an imagined Oxford who feel the abstract distance from such concerns their academic pursuits entangle them in... that sounds pretty good, but the balance of storytelling just kept hitting sour notes for me, long sections of school shenanigans or minutia, or where the magical twist is so thinly veiled it hardly matters, where the characters actions are irrelevant to moving us forward.

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.