Thought this would provoke discussion on book recommendations. What are your favorite books, ones that have had the most impact on you, that are less than 200 pages? Bonus points if they’re less than 100 pages.
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher is 96 pages and every one is gold.
Albert Camus's The Stranger. Not explicitly leftist, but definitely the book with the highest impact on me. His Myth of Sisyphus essay is also good if you want a non-fiction read.
Originally in French, so read it in French if you can.
if you’re interested in camus, check out the rev left radio episode on him and sartres ideological falling out. it’s a very interesting story. i loved the stranger. i tried to read sartres book nausea but could not get into it at all. but sartre was far more based.
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
No Name in the Street by James Baldwin (208 pages, oops)
Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase
My current answers are Society of the Spectacle and Capitalist Realism
The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi by Arundhati Roy.
In depth look on the split between India's founding fathers on Caste from the leftist, pro Ambedkar conclusion. 184 pages.
Amazing! Please do. I like collecting books to read almost as much as I like reading.
Thank you! Can't wait to look into this. Any particular recommendations from you?
Rudolph Rocker - Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice
142 pages baybee
Also
- State and Rev is 149 pages
- Kropotkin's Anarcho-Communism: Its Basis and Principles is 37
- Malatesta's At the Cafe is 121
- Foucault's Remarks on Marx is 189
- Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation is 197
- Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest is 137
- Kobayashi's The Crab Cannery Ship is 94
Just recently I really liked I'm Thinking of Ending Things which Charlie Kaufman is turning into a movie for Netflix
The novelization of The Phantom Menace is hilarious. It's like 300 pages but, you can skip through most of it.
Almost by a process of elimination as there aren't many books under 200 pages to name, not even Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is under 200 pages (fuckin' bullshit):
Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law if you don't count the afterword, on overreach in the use of copyrights and patents and general expansion of them.
Hinterland by Phil A Neel, which seems almost absurdly little known compared to what the importance of its actual meaningful attempt at understanding the rise of the far right in rural areas not merely as the product of some online message boards or Facebook, but in the economic decline and contradictions that exist in those areas.
The Crisis is maybe the most visible in the desert because the Crisis makes deserts. And it is these deserts that make the militias - or at least that make them an actual threat. The grim potential of these new Patriot parties arises via their ability to organize in the vacuum left by the collapse of local economies. It's easy for city-dwellers to dismiss the militias as simple far right fanboys playing soldier in the Arizona desert, but that's because the real deserts are largely invisible from the metropolis - they are simply too far beyond its walls. The progressive narrative, embodied in an entire sub-genre of think piece that we might simply call Tax Collector Journalism, therefore tends to treat these issues as if nearby ruralites just "oppose taxes" and therefore bring such funding shortfalls on themselves. A slightly more sinister variant argues that, by backing candidates that reject increases in property tax, small, often out of county Patriot groups actually construct the crises facing these rural areas.
But these positions are nonsensical when we consider that fact that collapse of revenues drawn from land via extractive industries also means a declining property value for these lands and therefore a diminishing base of property taxes to draw from, all accompanying the disappearance of any commodity tax from timber sales, for example. To claim that this crisis was somehow "created" by anti-tax conservative ruralites or by small, relatively recently developed anti-government groups simply ignores that the basis of tax revenue is in industrial production, where taxed at the level of capital, commodity sale, land ownership, or wage income. Less industrial output means either fewer taxes or a higher share of tax-to-income for most residents. Increased property taxes likely cannot be afforded by small landholders, for whom employment is sparse - and therefore the progressive's alternative of increasing property taxes is simply a program of dispossession for small landholders. It is no wonder, then, that these smallholders align themselves with ranchers, miners, and even larger corporate landowners (all of whom will be paying the largest lump sum in taxes) to oppose such measures.
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton is cool too. No idea what the ending means.
History books can be kind of dense even if they're sub 200 pages which is deceiving
I thought that Heart Berries, a memoir by author Terese Marie Mailhot, was an intensely emotional telling of the life of an indigenous woman growing up on a Canadian reservation, having to battle with racism, dysfunctional upbringing, abuse and to top it all off with her own mental health issues.
I really enjoyed this one, and it clocks in at just 160 pages long.
