Critiques et Commentaires

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pop history of technology and neuroscience, the mental processes of books vs media embedded in distraction, the ongoing plasticity of our minds to optimize towards what we attend to, failures of hypermedia in education and adtech-driven fragmentation of thought.