User Profile

loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 2 months ago

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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loppear's books

Currently Reading

2024 Reading Goal

22% complete! loppear has read 20 of 90 books.

qntm: Fine Structure (2021, Independently Published) 4 stars

several good storylines

3 stars

Vivid and imaginative, crams so much in and not all of it fits but such fun. I originally read this as it was appearing wiki'd on e2, and many years later it reads much more like comic book superheroes than hard mysterious sci-fi, and that's perfectly enjoyable.

reviewed Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey: Orbital (EBook, Grove Atlantic) 5 stars

A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize–winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation …

my bookclub did not like this

5 stars

Look, this is not-a-novel and is not-sci-fi, unless we freeze and shatter those definitions - but I would read more fictive-philosophical-observational whatever this was on most any subject. There's no plot, there's hardly movement as we do just what it says at the top, circle the earth 16 times in a single day aboard the space station. Instead, we dive deeply into the human experience of Earth, family and civilization and war and politics and futures, and separation and disorientation from it all.

Imani Perry: South to America (Hardcover, 2021, Ecco, Ecco Press) 4 stars

challenging

3 stars

A difficult read: first for a rambling conversational style that demands steady accumulation along threads of memoir, travel, genealogy, and history; second and deeply, for layering complications on The South, our senses of racism and slavery and treason and charm. Responding to current events - BLM, MeToo, Monuments - but not lingering there for long.

reviewed Wilding by Eric Schlosser

Isabella Tree, Eric Schlosser: Wilding (2019, New York Review Books) 4 stars

This a blow by blow and month by month account of how a well-managed, but …

lovely on unexpected ecological joys when we let go

3 stars

If you had a castle and 3500 acres intensively farmed dairy pastures and crops, and realized that wasn't sustainable, and so sought conservation funding to let it return to a wild state... this is the book is for you to rethink what wild might mean. Presents a hopeful sense that conservation and ecological repair should not be a static goal or species-specific understanding or undertaking ("this used to be wetlands, these birds are only found in closed-canopy forests") but a dynamic stepping back and observing and waiting to find out what the purpose of letting nature proceed may be.

María Puig de la Bellacasa: Matters of Care (2017, University of Minnesota Press) 4 stars

responding to more-than-human feminist complications

4 stars

It is hard to say easily what this directly contributes, a weaving and complication of many thinkers - Latour, Haraway, Tronto, Stengers - on care's challenges, on critique and trust-building - dissent from within - for avoiding objectification and maintenance of obligations to more than just our tribe, to more than just human relationships. Roves slowly from STS to permaculture and soil ecological timescales, full of considered light shoves and repositionings of our language and thinking.

Rosemary Kirstein: The Steerswoman (Paperback, 1989, Del Rey) 4 stars

The Steerswoman is the first novel in the Steerswoman series. Steerswomen, and a very few …

promising start and pace

4 stars

Content warning for some reason the slow steady conceptual reveal here wants to be hidden, but no plot spoilers