User Profile

loppear

loppear@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 3 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

33% complete! loppear has read 30 of 90 books.

T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets 4 stars

Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were …

/ you say I am repeating / something i have said before. i shall say it again. /

3 stars

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Finding my elegy (2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Co.) 4 stars

late in the middle

3 stars

/ 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. /

Roberto J. Gonzalez: Zapotec Science : Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca (2001) 4 stars

detailed crop management practices, in a monograph argument about scientific validity

4 stars

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.

Nicholas Carr: The Shallows (2011, W. W. Norton & Company) 4 stars

holds up and better than I expected

4 stars

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.

David Hinton: Hunger Mountain (2012, Shambhala) 5 stars

Come along with David Hinton on a series of walks through the wild beauty of …

beautiful philosophical bridge

5 stars

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.

reviewed A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum

Etaf Rum: A Woman Is No Man (2019, Harper) 4 stars

This debut novel by an Arab-American voice,takes us inside the lives of conservative Arab women …

Did not enjoy, but that's understandable

3 stars

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.