bonworld 2025 ^_^

Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity with the more than human world.

braiding sweetgrass is one of those rare books that meets and then exceeds your expectations. i found it to be very slow paced but i didn't mind, i enjoyed taking my time with it. kimmerer's expertise is clear and each chapter was so perfectly crafted it felt more like a short story collection than a book on science and nature.

i tend to remember the content of the majority of the books i read, but few of them stick with me in a way that lets them inform my worldview and the way i move through life, but this is a book that i think will do both to me. i appreciated the hopeful tilt she approaches climate change with and the ways our culture might change for the better; even though this book was written more than a decade ago i think that its lessons in the ways we treat our world are still pertinent.

probably one of the best new gns in recent years. i haven't read any of de souza's other stuff but this was perfect in every way. i love the looser style of illustration a lot, you can tell that this is by someone who has enough experience to make artistic choices that don't always align with what the "ideal" might be i guess.

technical prowess aside, the story was very sweet and sad and hopeful all at once and it did make me cry at 1 am so that's how you know it's good...

“Okay." The sharp-edged shell was rough against her lips, the cold flesh soft on her tongue. She swallowed and savored the brine. The tide was rising around their rock, lapping at her toes. “I'm cold," she said. “Let's go home."

i've been watching this book surf the stacks of my mom's collection for years waiting for the day i would finally pick it up, and this year i did! and it was so wonderful! i was initially confused by the seeming self-insertion of ruth (the author) into ruth (the character), but when i went digging for some articles it started to make sense. the meta-relationship between the reader and the author that ozeki explores was fascinating and a bit unsettling at points.

i loved the feeling this book evoked in general and i could probably go more in depth but i don't want to make this too long. you can read my actual review of it here if you'd like ^_^

“I will say this one thing more," said Teacher. “When you have decided what you want, remember that what one will not acknowledge is what one cannot properly control."

not a perfect book by any stretch of the imagination, a good quarter on the back end truly drags, but it's really stuck with me since i read it. i sometimes have trouble getting into ann leckie's books, i think her writing can be a little opaque for me, but after the initial discomfort of not having breq as a main character, i ended up really enjoying it.

one of my favorite things about this book was how the aliens were actually alien; leckie excels at writing povs from characters we aren't easily going to relate to bodily, i.e. breq as an ancillary with too many bodies to count. qven's chapters were perfectly difficult to conceptualize, the presgar not being anything like human beings or even human-adjacent sapient aliens. what a treat! i also really liked every character very much. enae and qven and reet my friends :-)

She could be quite brave in the presence of a Wyverary, but tall and lovely ladies made her shy, even if they were made of soap.

an old favorite i decided to revisit because i haven't read it in years. luckily i'd forgotten most of the plot so it was almost like i was reading it anew all over again! i am very fond of september and her wyverary and i love how genre conventions are at the core of the story. i'm going to try to get through the rest of the series this year because i want to know what happens next! i only vaguely remember books 2 and 3...

i'm glad i reread because it really reminded me how much i love this book. i hope september is doing well.

The loon calls and calls. The world turns to other metals. The calls are liquid mercury, wobbling over the steel water. The forested slopes and ridgelines of the eastern shore are islands of bronze, footless in shadows of ink.

robert macfarlane remains by and far one of the best nature writers of this generation, he treats each story with such care and respect. really good companion piece to braiding sweetgrass since he references kimmerer's 'grammer of animacy' concept introduced in that book. i think the subject was definitely a bit ambitious and i wish there had been more rivers and more politics but i really do love his writing so much that it balanced out.

macfarlane also has a very strong grasp of characterization so that every person he traveled with and learned from/with is incredibly well sketched. the contours of their personality are clear from his writing and it's sweet to get to spend time with the diverse array of personalities he is friends with.

If we want a future that puts people first, we need to recognize that there are no panaceas, and likely no utopias either. Nothing is coming to save us. There is no genie inside a computer that will grant us three wishes. Technology can't heal the world. We have to do that ourselves

book that is so good that made me so mad. i think adam becker is very brave for tackling this subject and revealing the farce of the bajillionare's visions of the future. i've long been suspect of so-called "ai experts" predicting the end of the world as we know it and this book essentially breaks down exactly how ridiculous most of their claims are.

i also really appreciated how becker really got to the root of these people's issues: a lot of the fantastical proclamations and baffling obsessions are borne from a fear of a death and inconsequential humanhood.

i suspect that for a lot of people this book was probably just good and not best-of-the-year worthy but i have an ai-pilled family member who's been yapping about this nonsense for years before it came into the public sphere so it was more personal to me than i expected. shocking turn of events: being told that the world will end because of ai as a young and impressionable person did not do wonders for my development.

The tip of Tain Hu's blade described one small analemma in the air, and Baru remembered her words, three years ago, spoken into the forest, into the birdsong and the silence: Symbols are power. You are a word, a mark...

seth dickinson when i get you. my mortal enemy for being so good at writing. i blew through the three books this summer and i think it's an understatement to say i liked them. more accurately: these books are permanently imprinted on every individual cell that my brain consists of. baru is my role model. she is the weirdgirl political enemy #1 representation we needed. you can see my page for her in bondiary vol.1

aside from how much i love baru and think she should be alive today so she could get really into crypto this was really a very well crafted book. i need to reread it so i can actually appreciate the complexity of the plot better. i feel like some of it went over my head because there were so many pieces but not in a bad way. i am waiting so patiently for baru 4.