Category: Reading Journal
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repeating falsehoods like incantations
From Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud: An irony of our technological advancement is that it has created a society that is in many ways scientifically more naive than the preindustrial world, in which no citizen who learned physics through backbreaking work and understood climate through subsistence agriculture would have assumed that he or she was exempt…
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Books read 2021
This is the first year I’ve actually kept a proper tally of the books I’ve read; as such, I’m not sure how representative (or not) it is of my usual reading habits. (In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not that representative, given I started keeping track when my mishap at the end of January ensured…
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fear is at the root of such things
From The Stone Sky by N K Jemisin, p210.
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Animals, stuffed : Vandermeer (2021), Hummingbird Salamander
Against a backdrop of ongoing ecological and social collapse, one woman—a security consultant of sorts, though not that sort of security—loses her grip on her job, family and life after she responds to the provocation of a note pressed into her hand as she exits a coffee-shop. The note points Jane toward Silvina, the somewhat…
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Origin story: Lessing (1979), Shikasta
Shikasta was not entirely what I expected—or even partly what I expected at first, to be quite honest. Lessing’s first “science fiction” novel starts off as something of a clunky jumble, but eventually clarifies into a variant of the Shaggy God Story, the trope where the state of the modern world is explained as being…