Critiques et Commentaires

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.

Satisfyingly grim and consequential build-up to a cataclysmic conflict between gods-reborn wraps up these threads nicely.

Written after Occupy and before 2016 with deep appreciation for the economic inequality and carceral injustice pushing the US towards internal conflict, this reflects a non-violent realism about rebellion, repression, and vigilante-fascist state outcomes with historical analysis interviews - many from prison - with Black Panther, ANC, Nazi resistance, US whistleblowers, and Occupy activists.

The fast-paced intrigue and backstabbing continues grippingly. While the first book stood alone well enough, this is missing the arc and focus making its success hang much more on what may be to come.

A positive and caring transformation of safety and crime, focusing on minimizing harms (from capitalism, patriarchy, trauma too) over sensationalizing crime and "bad guys", moving to care from fear, and restorative justice' shift from punishment to accountability, all illustrated with personal and complicating stories.

Young farmhand accounts of rural hard work, near poverty in that solo youthful maybe it's still a choice way, animal life and death, and appreciation for visceral connections between plants, weeds, markets, seasons, and guts spilled on the ground.

From an era of toy-model connectionist AI 20 years ago, a set of critiques that still hold some weight in pointing to basic symbolic structure and relationships our thinking exhibits that spicy autocomplete may categorically still be struggling with. What's lovely about this book (which probably isn't relevant overall and anymore) is the generosity and curiosity the author gives to the other side, in exploring and expanding on the models he's critiquing he's also bridging language and concepts between subfields rather than jumping precipitously to disagreement.