loppear started reading Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar
Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar
"When Jakub Procha is sent into space to examine a cosmic dust cloud covering Venus, it may be a solo …
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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34% complete! loppear has read 31 of 90 books.
"When Jakub Procha is sent into space to examine a cosmic dust cloud covering Venus, it may be a solo …
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.
All roads lead to Underhill, where it’s always winter, and never nice.
Harry Bodie has a famous grandmother, who wrote …
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.
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.
It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry …
Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago—“one day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. …
Richard Rothstein's 2017 best-selling book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America outlined the …