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Rayne Locked account

rynybooks@books.theunseen.city

Joined 6 months, 4 weeks ago

she/they, ella/elle pronouns please

My bookwyrm account.

Main: @salad_bar_breath@todon.nl

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2024 Reading Goal

12% complete! Rayne has read 2 of 16 books.

finished reading Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender

Felix Ever After (EBook, 2020, Balzer + Bray) 5 stars

From Stonewall and Lambda Award–winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a …

What a stellar YA coming-of-age novel!

Felix is a very relatable and great character, navigating romance and the complexities of his gender identity as a black trans teenage boy from a working class family, attending a prestigious arts program in Brooklyn.

Kacen's writing is clever but not pretentious. It introduces complex social topics in an approachable way that doesn't take from the story or preach.

I really hope the future brings us more YA novels with bipoc queer representation like this.

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The Seep (Hardcover, 2020, Soho Press) 4 stars

A blend of searing social commentary and speculative fiction, Chana Porter’s fresh, pointed debut is …

Review of 'The Seep' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Humanity has been finally united, thanks to the psychedelic transcendence brought by our new alien friends, the collective trip-inducing hivemind goop known as The Seep. War is over, poverty is over, capitalism is over, colonialism is over, no one can tolerate exploitation when they're acutely aware of the feelings of everybody else and all the animals and plants and each individual body cell. Art flourishes, new and strange occupations flourish, property is collective and abundant in every regard, endless possibilities open up before ourselves. Guided by the new, hyperempathetic Seep tech, people are modifying their bodies to be furries and cyborgs and anything else they want. Other animals ascend to linguistic sentience and we can talk to them now. Some people opt to live chill lives crafting or Seeping out to cool art shows, others take to exploring the boundaries of identity and personhood itself.

No catch, really. No hidden …

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Detransition, Baby (Hardcover, 2021, One World) 5 stars

A whipsmart debut about three women--transgender and cisgender--whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces …

Quick Review of Detransition, Baby

4 stars

This book had some incredible meditations and explorations of life as a trans person; how trans people relate to each other, themselves, and cis people; and trans parenthood. A really touching and well-written story, I found it painfully relatable and more than once had to stop reading to process the depth of emotions it was evoking.

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The Shape of Things to Come (Kersplebedeb) No rating

J. Sakai is one of North America’s most insightful and challenging radical intellectuals, best-known for …

with neo-colonial “Globalization” the u.s. empire and its capitalist rivals and enemies interpenetrate each other and develop within each other. While the Republican Party right wing is screaming about China as the main threat to evaporating u.s. military hegemony over the Pacific, major defense contractors like Boeing and Hughes are also becoming key aerospace contractors in and for the new capitalist China. In that role these two giant corporations “accidentally” gave their Chinese selves the technology of the advanced u.s. ICBMs, so that the Chinese military could leap into a new generation of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (both corporations just agreed to pay fines in the many millions of dollars to settle federal charges on this little boo-boo which was kept out of the TV News and front-page headlines).

The Chinese and u.s. empires are rivals but also increasingly partners, like the u.s. and France or Putin’s Great Russia and the reunified Germany. For that matter, president Bush’s younger brother Neil has joined Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese “Communist” president Jiang Zemin, on the board of Jiang’s new Grace semiconductor corporation in China, uniting a new generation of u.s. and Chinese capitalist dynasties. Just as General Motors has asked China’s Shanghai Automobile Corporation to be its partner in taking over South Korea’s large Daewoo auto corporation.

The Shape of Things to Come by 

"Beyond McAntiwar: notes on finding our footing in the collapsing stageset of the u.s. empire"