aka @kingrat@sfba.social. I'm following a lot of bookwyrm accounts, since that seems to be the only way to get reviews from larger servers to this small server. I make a lot of Bookwyrm lists. I will like & boost a lot of reviews that come across my feed. I will follow most bookwyrm accounts back if they review & comment. Social reading should be social.
I almost wanted to DNF at the beginning but I am very glad I did not DNF. Be patient with this book. It is worth it. I cried. I laughed. It's the coming of age story that is needed because we all can't just read The Bell Jar and stop there as if that is the definitive young woman at college story. No this book has added much to this genre or legacy. There should be more books like this. Being the only poor person in a room full of people who do not get your socioeconomic background and would rather pretend you don't exist is a terrible time.
Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem …
Does not deliver on the premise
2 stars
I picked this up because I was looking for works that espoused the ideas of Abundance but did a better job at either making the case for "build the stuff we want", or being a rallying cry for the idea as a political framework. That's not the premise for this book, nor does it really touch on the idea. The only thing he mentions doing more of is pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the context of one prong of his thesis. So what is it?
Harris promises that he'll show the way through the climate crisis, and it turns out he means by putting forward three-plus frameworks for exercising political power to do things that the book assumes we need to do to get off fossil fuels. His frameworks: marketcraft, public power, and communism. Marketcraft is basically really strong regulation of market forces (rather than just nudges). Public power is state ownership …
I picked this up because I was looking for works that espoused the ideas of Abundance but did a better job at either making the case for "build the stuff we want", or being a rallying cry for the idea as a political framework. That's not the premise for this book, nor does it really touch on the idea. The only thing he mentions doing more of is pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the context of one prong of his thesis. So what is it?
Harris promises that he'll show the way through the climate crisis, and it turns out he means by putting forward three-plus frameworks for exercising political power to do things that the book assumes we need to do to get off fossil fuels. His frameworks: marketcraft, public power, and communism. Marketcraft is basically really strong regulation of market forces (rather than just nudges). Public power is state ownership of key industries; he gives the example of building pumped-storage hydroelectricity. And by communism he means bottom-up pseudo anarchist revolution, such as the Zapatistas. He also makes the claim that if he does his job right, his favored strategy of those three won't be favored.
For each of the strategies, he states how they might work, and what might prevent them from working. Except he devotes nearly 2/3 of the book to communism and his criticism of it is that capitalism is probably more successful at violence than communists are.
And in the last 7-ish percent of the book, he puts forward that it'll really be a mix of 2 or more of the strategies and gives surface level examples of how the strategies might mesh. And his final flourish, the one concrete organizing thing he thinks people should do, is establish "disaster councils" that work across all three strategies, but devotes only a couple of sentences to how these could work. None of what the disaster councils would do (as described) really deals with the climate crisis.
About the only thing he says won't work is laissez faire capitalism or other pure market forces. And dismisses it with a wave of his hand that it's already failed. I agree, actually, but that is easy.
Is he actually wrong? Hell if I know, but it's nearly impossible to be wrong with such a broad position. The whole thing comes across as "here's what I like and don't like about three kinds of leftism." I just wasn't very impressed, but I'm just a cranky dude on the internet. What do I know?
Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial …
Really gobsmacked that SFPL is doing a book on hallucination machines ("AI") for One City One Book this year. (This is now added to the One City One Book list.)
Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem …
About to hit the final chapter and calling it a night. I'll maybe finish tomorrow. I'm really rooting for the author, but I don't think he's going to pull this thing off.
Cordelia and Aral attempt to settle down, but their wedded bliss is soon shattered because politics.
I liked this more than “Shards of Honor”, but I'm still not a member of the McMaster Bujold fan club. I still find her writing style a bit… strange, and again the questionable language pops up. Certain plot elements, which I understand are integral to future novels, just didn't interest me, and it was hard to care. But some chapters and passages really caught my attention, and I suspect I might enjoy the later novels more.
The Kamogawa Food Detectives is the first book in the bestselling, mouth-watering Japanese series, for …
Very cosy, but not much mystery
3 stars
A father-daughter duo of “food detectives” sleuth their way to recreating beloved lost meals.
Felt more like tableaus flowing into one another than a novel. Nagare, is almost Holmesian in his ability to infer what clients desire from the interviews conducted by Koishi. Relentlessly cosy, but readers have zero chance at solving any of the “mysteries”. I found it unsatisfying as it’s short on detecting, focusing more on patrons’ often bittersweet stories. Not the book I thought I was getting, and I prefer something with more “meat” on its bones.
A multiverse story of love, loss, time travel, and final-stage capitalism from award-winning author Brenda …
I used my time listening to the Mariners v. the Tigers in the ALDS (yay for streaming radio!) to add all the Philip K. Dick award winners to a list. That's an award for distinguished science fiction first published in paperback. Most of these, including Time's Agent, seem like stuff right up my alley.
As always, if you are on SFBA.club, all the entries have descriptions and hi-res covers. The list on other servers depends on what rando first added each edition.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove and “writer …
humorous and purposeful, after a shaky start
3 stars
An unfolding lighthearted mystery but with heavy themes of despair and unlikable ensemble, the intentional misdirection of each preceding chapter makes for a shaky start that settles into a reliable pacing for uplifting comic humanity.
An utterly excellent look behind the scenes of one of the 20th century's most intriguing poets. True, it is not for everyone as these are indeed, her journals. Never intended for publication, they are a hodgepodge of topics, styles, and times that are maddeningly inconsistent. That said there is no finer way to catch a glimpse of the woman behind the poetry.
The single most frustrating aspect of the Journals is what is glaringly missing. Her final two journals were destroyed after her death and it is these that cover the time when she was crafting the poems that made up the collection contained in 'Ariel'. How wonderful it would have been to see how she created and polished those! Alas, we will never know.
In the year 2038, the earth has been ravaged by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Retroviruses …
I really am not following what's happening here through the first chapter. If I can't get into this by the end of chapter 2, the book is getting DNF. I've been avoiding reading because i wasn't getting this, so setting a deadline for myself to get through.
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA …
Ugh, no
2 stars
Samantha—loner and outsider at prestigious Warren University—finds the rest of her writing cohort beneath her and relentlessly denigrates them with her arty friend, Ava, until an invitation arrives.
I did not care for this at all. I found it predictable, and irritatingly coy about its predictability. The protagonist is the worst mean girl of all the mean girls, and a tedious, self-absorbed one at that. I just found everything about it silly and boring, and wouldn't have read it had I known it was magical realism, which I despise. Absolutely not for me.
