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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Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
Engaging tangent sequel on borders, racial justice, and love in a violent world. Plot details and world shifts aside, characterization pulls the weight well here.
Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels gradually wreak havoc …
Stunning, a climate apocalypse grounded in our current reality, that powerfully conveys a violent experience of living through a lifetime's decline in an intensely personal and local story - no boom-post-apocalypse, yet so many sharp inflections of loss and choosing between things you thought wouldn't matter til after you were gone away. It would be bizarre to call this a hopeful novel, but the undercurrent grows towards acceptance and dependence in the face of uncertainty, and it is beautifully done.
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and …
I'd be curious what genre readers enjoy this, as it choppily blends historical fiction, romance, time travel, spy thriller, and reflections on genocide. Only the first two seem a strength here, and they're not my taste, but I would have settled in more easily for a slow burn romance across the last few centuries if the author hadn't kept interrupting me with the rest.
Aiza has always dreamt of becoming a Knight. It's the highest military honor in the …
Did not love the individual pursuit of militaristic honor to defeat a singular evil, in a story of systemic imperial injustice. But it is a pretty and in its way empowering YA graphic novel.
"When Jakub Procha is sent into space to examine a cosmic dust cloud covering Venus, …
What to take seriously? I am always here for spider aliens in space, and for retrospective comparisons of life under communist oppressive distrust and capitalist freewheeling distrust, and maybe for reflections on marital aspirations to common purpose or individual, and a slice of unfamiliar perspective in historical allusion... this was also a mess of a story.
Richard Rothstein's 2017 best-selling book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our …
Most valuable for the vignettes of small movements by individuals reaching out to neighbors, cross-town faith and community groups, city action spurred by organizing to redress and counteract the enumerated and on-going harmful effects of racial segregation.
It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But …
Doctorow at his strongest, ala Little Brother, didactic and engaging, young characters imagining freedom to work together on new ways to respond to current climate challenges and reactionary repression.
A young poet tells the story of his harrowing migration from El Salvador to the …
A child migrant story from 1999, fearfully relevant, and set in a prelude to the worst cartel and DHS aspects of today. The youthful perspective keeps much of the terror hidden, and so we experience the physical toll and chaotic uncertainty in its raw immediacy with the humanity of coyotes and older companions cast in complicated and appreciable light.
All roads lead to Underhill, where it’s always winter, and never nice.
Harry Bodie has …
A children's fantasy series reveals dark neglect in its design and decay for our middle-aged has-been unwilling protagonist. Mostly delivers on the satirical bit in the midst of Covid, but tries to fit far too much into a novella.
Fits a theme of parenting that recognizes kids and here teens have increasing and confusing needs to grow into adults by adding new layers of autonomy that feel like rejection and rebellion while still looking for boundaries and support - make room for their awkward developmental spurts and emotional contentions with one foot in childhood still.
At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, …
Making sense of your place outside of the world your friends and family inhabit, or always having a reason to remain outside that world. The pace is off in a way that works, depending on how you read (or choose to elide) the ending.
Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were …
Linked meditations on time, the moment, the futility of striving, full of overturned binaries, overtones of religious or monastic fervor, but also not quite. The first of these, Burnt Norton, felt strongest, perhaps just more quoted.
/ We make too much history / with or without us / there will be the silence /
Some wonderful lines jump out, more from the newer poems in here. Not an immediately coherent collection, on themes of death and long views and nature of course, but will revisit over the years.
/ It takes a while to learn to talk / the long language of the rock. /
Ethnographic report from working as a fieldhand in rural Oaxaca for subsistence food and small scale cash crops, and perspective on the community relationships that non-industrial production methods create that help contextualize and contradict a western agricultural critique of efficiency and productivity.
Determined to learn the truth about the Guidestars--two points of light that hang motionless in …
Focus shifts from town fantasy conflict to a stranger inhospitable environment and the diffuse intense culture of survival. Some beautiful didactic bits of other ways of organizing kin and relationships, and measured plot revealing a deeper backstory.