Working through Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti, and holy fuck is it a great book.
Tried to find Lenin in a bookstore, they did not have Lenin. But they had an old ass copy of "Lenin for beginners" which I devoured in a day, holy shit such a good intro to Leninism for an ADHD riddled dumbass like me.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Lenin_for_Beginners.html?id=Mbm3AAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y
How is it?! I have heard Alyson from Red Menace recommend it so that piqued my interest.
Good so far, but in a depressing way. The book starts in 2024 after a multi-decade series of economic and ecological disasters has left the US a hellscape of horrifically violent poverty surrounding a few walled neighborhoods. Real uplifting stuff.
Kitchen Confidential. I love this book so much. I worked in a kitchen in high school and worked in a meat department for years before going to uni. I miss the absolute maniacs I used to work with so much. My internship was like going to the store and getting the program for races at Santa Anita, or placing thousand dollar bets on my way home for my manager. We drank, ate, and smoked our asses off in the backroom (we never called it an office). It was great; walk in hungover and absolutely kick ass for six hours in silence and then cut each other up for the rest of the shift. So many memories.
Also reading the Wayne Kramer MC5 book and the book about DARPA.
Almost finished with The Shock Doctrine - what a depressing book! Really good, but just plain grim.
Has anybody read Grace Blakeley's Stolen? Audible is reccing it to me as a leftist economics-focused book
the chapter (chapters? been a bit) on Russia in the 90s will never leave me
My book club should finish Blackshirts and Reds this week. I'm gonna try and finish off State and Rev and/or On Contradiction before next week when we decide what to read next and maybe do some book reports.
I highly recommend doing a book club with some people you know, or maybe here or the discord? Ours meets once a week and even if not everyone shows up, it's a great chance to talk theory, life, philosophy, and bullshit with some friends while giving people reading targets.
Addendum: I've got a copy of Wretched of the Earth that I dipped my toe into. It's probably too much for a casual book club, but I'm interested for myself. How dense is it throughout?
Finished Braiding Sweetgrass, shout out to the people on here that recc'd it. I got my wife to read it too and she loves it!
Now i'm reading the ultimate poster, Lenin, What is To Be Done
I'm gonna have to check out Braiding Sweetgrass, it has been in my mind since you mentioned it last!
Just finished ‘Capitalist Realism’ and now I’m rereading the Earthsea books.
Its not at all like LOTR, and it holds up extremely well.
I heard that her publishers more or less forced her to write a YA fantasy series, and she somewhat resented that so turned it a bit on its head. They wanted the typical sappy romantic shallow sort of story, but she went way deeper than that as she's wont to do.
Its the story of a young wizard attempting to get his hold on the discipline when, you guessed it, things go awry. It delves into a lot deeper topics too of course throughout the course of the series, like pain, loss, belonging, trust etc.
It has her signature poignant prose and she took great care in crafting her world and the magic system.
You can tell its for a younger audience but I still enjoy it. Its definitely worth the read.
I've been reading Dracula by Bram Stoker. It actually holds up quite well, though the prose is a bit dated. It's actually like a found footage story in some ways, since the whole thing is presented through letters, journals, etc. There's one chapter that's very similar to the movie Alien where Dracula is on a ship and picking off the crew one by one.
I've also just read the first few chapters of Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel. It's a book about the Russian Civil War. Extremely brutal and unfiltered, kind of like the book version of Come and See. One of the first chapter is how a White officer captures his son and discovers he's a Red, so he hacks him to death with a sword. His other son then comes for revenge. All this is narrated as a letter from the third son to their mother.
I'm almost done with Zorba the Greek, and it's really boosted my interest in Eastern European literature. If anyone's got recommendations for other novels from the region feel free to share. My next book is going to be Lolita but after that I want to get into Eastern European fiction. Currently on my prospective-reads list I've got The Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel; Poor Folk or Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Freedom or Death by Nikos Kazantzakis; and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.
I read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin over the weekend and it was some real good shit. Great prose, compelling characters, and that's not even considering all of the really fantastic explorations of sex and gender. I'm going to get around to reading The Dispossessed soon, and maybe Earthsea at some point too.
