Critiques et Commentaires

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.

Library sent me what appears to be an original 1943 printing.

This was nice, visually engaging, girl-led, empowering, power of truth and justice in collective struggle.

A perfect blend of deep historical translation, East vs West metaphysics and cosmology, mindfulness, poetry, and walks in the woods. Seeing mind as landscape, emptying our mind like "gazing into a flawless mirror of sky", in sincerity our inner thoughts are the same as our outer thoughts.

This was a struggle, the setting and generational story of arranged marriages, domestic violence, and isolated women in strict conservative households is grounded, relevant, and sometimes well delivered. The author stand-in character really irked me in her attempts at advice, and I'm realizing it's regularly difficult for me to read average characters acting confused in the dark about well-foreshadowed violence.

Unnerving and fragmentary, very satisfying exploration around questions of memory, trust, and institutional decay.