It's fucking June already?! Goddayum. Where the fuck is time flying?
I just finished "The Jakarta Method." It's really good. I'm probably going to start "Cloudsplitter" soon.
Currently reading Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson and I'm finally getting around to reading Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media.
Taking a break from theory and reading pulp urban fantasy. Detroit Free Zone series is actually pretty good, cyberpunk/urban fantasy with very explicit anticapitalist themes. Kinda reminds me of Shadowrun.
Detroit Free Zone
Looks like I just found my next series.
Reading The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov, and it's really funny. It's a satirical novel written during the NEP period of the Soviet Union about a bourgeois fail-son trying to find a chair that his mother in law sewed diamonds into to prevent them from being seized and redistributed by the Bolsheviks post-revolution.
This is a more difficult question to answer than it should be, because I'm surrounded by stacks of books and I will randomly cycle between them while only very rarely finishing any of them. And also a kindle that I'll do the same thing on. But the two books I'm reading most consistently at the moment are The Iliad translated by Robert removedles and Conan by Robert E. Howard, an ebook of all the Conan the Barbarian stories that I got for a dollar. I know, two problematic reads. I'm halfway through the sixty page introduction to the Iliad, which has been interesting as it goes over the history of the Iliad, the scholarly debate over how it was composed—a debate that has itself spanned centuries—plus some general background about Mycenean Greece and also a little background on Homer's world. I've never actually read the Iliad, not even an abridged version in school (which I did do for the Odyssey) so I felt like it was finally time to read it. But my actual impetus for reading The Iliad (and I'm going to read the Odyssey after I finish it) is because I want to read The Classical World by Robin Fox, a general survey of ancient history. But I found quickly that the author assumed the reader had at least some sort of familiarity with Homer, and I thought I'd appreciate that book more having read him first.
As for the Conan books, I kinda like them. REH's race science is hugely problematic, for sure. And the prose is often terrible (though there's occasional glimmers of good prose in there, it's just the exception not the rule). But the stories are just engaging enough that I want to keep reading. After I finish these I want to read Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore, one of modern Fantasy's first female writers. Pulp, but it's about a Christian female knight and it's written by a women? Sign me up. I'm gonna be crushed if they suck. One of my biggest guilty pleasures is Red Sonja, the exploitation female counterpart to Conan. If I could get a version of that that is less problematic I'm going to be pleased.
As for any Socialist literature, I'm going to commit to reading The People's Marx. But even an abridgement of Capital is imposing, so I might read A People's History of the United States first just to dip my toes in something from a Left perspective that's a little more approachable.
yes, but id be careful about citing it, the authors make lots of assertions without sources, and lots of assertions that can't be proven.
but besides that its just a goldmine of Better Germany being better at everything, and descriptions of an almost ridiculously idealistically constituted state. shit reads like it was organized by hippies---hippies who eventually set up the stasi lol
Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of extremes" I'm over three-hundred pages in which means i'm just over halfway done!
I read his 'trilogy' about the nineteenth century ages ago but never this one. I'm unsure if it's not as good as the rest or if I just developed more in the interval.
Finished Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III.
Library book haul: Kindred (started it today), Song of Solomon, Sula, Motorcycle Diaries (watch the movie and reading the book this month!).
Personal improvement book: How to talk so kids will listen & listen so kids will talk — one chapter in and I'm already having my mind blown.
Value, Price and Profit . I'm amazed how much I'm learning this time around re-reading it
Some one on here got me to read The Malazan Book of the Fallen. It is really fucking good and has perhaps the most accurate and horrific descriptions of medieval warfare I've ever read.
Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life, not what i was expecting at all but a good read, he had a brilliant writing style that gets you through some of the more culturally stilted parts. Probably gonna go with inverting the pyramid next if anyone here likes football
