nathalie
I don't know how to review a book like this. I've been torn apart by images of naked, bleeding grief bookended by descriptions of kimchi and the best noodle broths. Impossible how Zauner sways so easily between joyous memories and the still fresh pain of losing her mother. Hoping someday I have half the strength to love like she does.
Vital utopian optimism in the face of apocalyptic climate disaster. Half-earth socialism is both an attempt to map a way out of the inequity and instability capital has wraught, and an invitation to imagine beyond the bandaid solutions currently being proposed to push annihilation onto a future generation. A better world is possible. Believing anything less is a death sentence to us and everyone who'll follow.
It is not a perfect theory, being just a brisk 200 pages (about 30 are notes and citations), and the speculative fiction bookends frequently read with the didactic clunkiness of an edutainment cartoon. But its authors are quick to draw attention to the work still to be done and the long history of supporting texts both modern and ancient (yeah, Pluto gets a feature). Half-earth socialism succeeds as a foundation out of hopelessness towards an indefinite but possible future.
It's accessible enough to reach beyond academic circles while not lacking in research depth, which is an achievement in itself. I highly recommend the companion game at play.half.earth even if you don't read the book. It's a surprisingly robust global planning simulation that helped me understand some of the book's more technical theories, while also showing socialism can be fun (and only mildly terrifying when things go wrong).
I picked this up out of morbid curiosity, and unsurprisingly it was quite dull. A beat-for-beat retelling of the movie partially sanitized for a middle school demographic. 13 Going on 30 is probably one of the least adaptable rom coms a publisher could pick (is it even the same story without that soundtrack?), but it made more sense when I realized this was aiming at the preteen novella market rather than grocery store moms.
The biggest change is they got rid of Andy Serkis' ball vice joke (boo), and made Wendy less of a last minute villain (good). The ending confession is still weird and awkward and the conservative nostalgia even more explicit, but this time it reads less as pining for the 80s and more a loose dislike of techno and feminine sexuality (a lateral move if anything). The one change I quite like is leaving Jenna 13 rather than flash cutting to her wedding. It takes some of the bitterness away from Jenna breaking up a couple on their wedding day and feels more optimistic as Jenna actually gets to live her life.
Missed Judy Greer on every page.
Exceptionally bleak capital realism. It makes a lot of sense reading about Kobo Abé's love of Kafka, as both are similarly preoccupied with the hopelessness of living under capitalism, how it alienates us from people who ought to be allies, and the seeming inexscapability of it's control. They also both utterly fail to perceive women as human beings, describing them as anywhere between silly, beautiful nothings to stupid animals.
I don't know enough about Japanese literature to fully lump this in with the dry, thematically interesting but socially upsetting western canon, but if you dislike that mode of writing this isn't going to change that. It might just be my translation, but this is written (somewhat appropriately) with the flare of an exhausted biologist recording the movement of moss.
I imagine I'd have a lot more fun discussing this in a class than actually reading it. If anyone wants to commiserate about it's highs and lows (lol, cause he's in a hole) let me know.
A sympathetic, unwaring untangling of leftist guilt during parallel revolutions. Jumping between contemporary Shanghai, pre-to-post communist China, and 1980s Cape Town, How to Be a Revolutionary is less concerned with historical specificity than the mutual grief and shame felt by those unable to save the people around them from state violence. It is both a condemnation of inaction and a challenging attempt to interrogate our complicity in ongoing atrocities.
Structurally, it's an ambitious bit of time traveling (if occasionally difficult to keep mentally organized). The second act's pacing slows considerably but in service of expanding on characters whose motivations near the end would otherwise read as reckless (if not outright cruel). There is still a pronounced amount of shock value in the final revelations which I am torn on, though the historical context makes it feel a bit more justified.
Recommend for fellow comrads struggling with apathy and guilt at how little any one person can do.
Among the most influential pieces of theory I have read in a very long time. Wark bluntly challenges the established forms by which we address the upper class, arguing that in order to imagine and work towards a better future we must first discard the old forms of conceptualizing it. I would hesitate to call it inspiring (existential terror remains such even with the language to know it), but Wark's ability to blend technical, theoretical, and cultural forces into a unified theory has the effect of finally emerging from a deep sleep.
The last few chapters get a bit in the weeds dismissing Marxist theorists directly, serving as a preemptive defense against their arguments but moving away from the tangible rhetoric of the earlier chapters. It makes the book somewhat less accessible as a whole, but is a minor blemish on what is still a very readable academic text. Essential reading for modern Marxist's, particularly the more obnoxious and online among them (heh, wonder who that's for).
In insolation each story is lightweight if unremarkable, but collected together, the repetition and simplicity becomes an annoyance. “A misunderstood, not-like-other-girls girl feels seen by the sensitive stud she mistook as a douche.” A bit too uncharitable to call it Wattpad-core, but certainly working from a similar base.
A defiant scream into the universe; a refusal to become only pain, bodies without self; poetry born of love and death and comic spite. Hope is so hard to find in this bloodied, fragile existence, but it's there, beating at the bruises and concrete that could never bury us. Whispers turning to cries in defiance of anyone arrogant enough to think they get to choose when we die.
The art is still immaculate and looks phenomenal on the heavy stock paper (can't imagine how expensive this was to print). The writing is...fine? Characters are painted in broad strokes and heavy emotions without actually getting to do anything significant. There's a reliance on “humans are the real monsters” mic drops that I find tiring (especially in relationship to the films which are both more specific in their targets and empathetic towards their characters).
Fun if you are as obsessed with Alien/s as me but not much to chew on as a book itself.
