Reading for fun, threads over the years of scifi, history, social movements and justice, farming, philosophy. I actively work to balance out the white male default in what I read, but have a long way to go.
He/they for the praxis.
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of The Ants comes this dynamic and visually spectacular portrait …
Nerdy and approachably thorough, the level of structural and social development of these ants (millions to a nest!) is astoundingly conveyed in short picture-filled chapters.
Expanding the author's prior investigation into "wild" (airquoted throughout) space and rejecting the line between human and nature, she philosophically and environmentally unpacks what obligations we have to animals and species - in her view, mistaken valuing of "naturalness" and "species genetic purity" (reflecting colonial inflected categorization) rather than autonomy and ecosystem diversity - through location reporting on zoos and conservation projects, eradication campaigns and captive breeding. Well summed up in the suggestion that rather than de-extincting woolly mammoths, we coexist with nature in new ways such that we can imagine elephants able to migrate over the next ten thousand years to occupy places where they would adapt with hairy coats.
Roadside Picnic is set in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called the Visitation that …
Second read, the sense of absurdist normalcy around incomprehensible change drives every scene and is just gripping.
Consistently strong interior stories of women reaching for meaning and connection.
Roadside Picnic is set in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called the Visitation that …
Re-read after many years for bookclub.
Witty sitcom romp layered with grief and trauma, perhaps some growth and acceptance... this never goes deep, and it would have been better if it could have, but then it wouldn't be light-hearted and easy.
Defeated, crushed, and driven almost to extinction, the remnants of the human race are trapped …
Satisfying coming of age and coming to terms with fraught systems of power, with an interesting world at war to make sense of and plenty of sarcasm. But, a lot of military and courage and fight filling in for connections.
The future is blue. Endless blue...except for a few small places that float across the …
Funny and irreverent and angry and at home and at peace with living on the garbage heap of our drowned future.
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were …
The dystopian premise that's central but hardly the point narrows and sharpens this otherwise moving English boarding school story of childhood misinterpretations, loves, obsessions growing into adult reframing, acquiescence, and ailing concerns to an objective study of universal questions.
Similar questions of identity and purpose as Permutation City, again that satisfying hard sharp didacticism, a broader galactic exploration scope for minds to weigh their decisions, but didn't resolve nearly as clearly for me.
Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than …
Tender and painful, how we make sense of destroying those close to us.
Sancia Grado is a thief, and a damn good one. And her latest target, a …
Beautiful imagined world of near-steampunk and near-gods and near-dynastic-capitalism. Within a caper with increasing stakes, confronts freedom, slavery, and knowing oneself.
The future is blue. Endless blue...except for a few small places that float across the …
Hilarious right off the heap.
Bookclub pick, I'm on edge from the flimsy stereotyping and the seven year old's lisp from the getgo but I have to assume someone knows what they're doing, for now...
Colonialism has always meant genocidal extinction, and with Kendi-esque clarity Lindqvist charts the shifting justifications and revelations swept aside or welcomed in "civilized" society grappling with these terrors and all too normal evils. The elements of the author's own travelogue and of Conrad's literary and experiential background for "Heart of Darkness" are minor counterpoints to a forceful documentation of societal guilt.