Critiques et Commentaires

Two fascinating books smooshed together, neither what I was expecting, both earnest enough. First, a very readable light explanation that "green growth" and any ecological turn that leaves capitalism in place will be insufficient to avoid extractive exploitation beyond ecological limits we're facing. Second, a niche academic journey through Marx' years after Capital Vol 1 arguing from thin circumstance that he too realized some of the ecological necessities of degrowth rather than unerring progress. If that's what you needed to hear to slow down, well ok!

Look, I know I've got too many fiction in flight but a bookclub beckons, alright?

Restless story telling swirling around a Thai monk recounting a long life. I found the first half's turbidity of time and perspective most engaging as a way of revealing memory and history of a place transforming from magical mysterious jungle, flowing into a more direct and unceasing narrative of human conflict with the powerful animals of the encroached forest.

A beautiful collection of childhood writings to remember and witness a girl becoming an active resister for a more just world. Corrie's story moved me at the time of her death (in Gaza in 2003) as we are close in age and point of origin in Washington State, and this revisiting was made more poignant by the current war and by my now perspective as a parent considering the family's decision to put this together. For content, this is a varied set of childhood poems and journals and sketches, school essays and early college writing on relationships and local crisis care, and accelerating global anger with capitalism and involvement in the 2001-era anti-war movement.

I did not enjoy this as much as the subsequent The Light Pirate; similar themes of aging in disaster, the tenuousness of our ability to stay in communication and relation, and evocative desolate scenery, but with more convoluted and ultimately unnecessary and shaky setting and plot complications.

Eagerly giving this a re-read by audiobook for the first time, which is the fullest-cast full-cast production.

A delightful heist buddy crew against the odds space marines aliens in all configurations inscrutable galactic menace histories of oppression misunderstanding and hope. Also, a bit light and scattered.

Personally revealing comic essays, uninhibited philosophical reflection and genitalia and cat butts, with a sophisticated depth of introspection on perception, action, and the complexity of the modern world.

Each element is pristine and sun-baked here, like the setting: reluctant detective on the murder case, wealthy aesthetic recluse, mundanely dystopian AI. And as spare translucent noir, I enjoyed it.

Compelled to return to the frontlines of madness, clawing for oblivion in the face of evils and devils, a glint of compassion and sanity from another human sharing the experience. Deftly haunting storytelling.

What a delightful sprawling madcap slice of New York. Dark and funny, an overwhelming cast and set of threads and diversions. Did any of it matter? Does it voice a rosy cozy gritty 60s or grimly stubborn mid-point between southern oppression and modern violence of drugs and poverty? As recommended to me, the audiobook is an absorbing performance.

Wasteways and waste regimes, this points to larger intersectional issues of production, consumption, and political-institutional capture - but is primarily a close comparison of waste management policy in Boston & Seattle in the 1980s and 90s, focused on ultimately narrow variations in recycling programs and citizen input, and how those are compliant or resistant to our national narrative of trash.

Atmospheric, crashing ocean surf, tangled beaten bodies at the edge of land and sea. The title collection most coherent to me, the overall sense of storm-tossed black Carribean experience more than any particular line or shape.

Intrigued by the rapidly burgeoning scientific research on plant capacities, a climate journalist turns to current questions of intelligence, consciousness, and sociality. Overlaps with Franz de Waal, Donna Haraway, Future Ecologies, etc in pushing at our human-centered and exploitative perspective on the world to wonder what it would mean to consider our intellectual capacities diffused to all distant kin.

Continuing to walk and collect stories, more lovely weaving of perspectives in this one.