You know like when you're stroking a cat and it suddenly decides it doesn't want to be stroked anymore and it scratches you? How do we harvest the revolutionary potential of that?
You know like when you're stroking a cat and it suddenly decides it doesn't want to be stroked anymore and it scratches you? How do we harvest the revolutionary potential of that?
Have you settled on the titles for the poll? I just wanted to throw out the idea of including some second-most popular choices from closer polls from earlier months, as they might have been some of the most desired titles on the site but just up against a superstar like Debt or something.
I remember there was a month where there were a ton of killer titles (I think it was Vijay Prishad's Washington Bullets, Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa I think, maybe also David Harvey's Brief History of Neoliberalism?) and being bummed that no matter which book won we'd foreclose the option of reading any of the other ones.
We've has some ideas but not settled on any yet, we were going to ask for suggestions in the post tomorrow.
Since we restarted the book club again this month our focus for the first few votes was on books that were short, relevant, easy to read, and that have more of a gloomer/"this is how we can win" kind of outlook and that way hopefully more people would join in with the read since the participation really waned off when we were doing it before. I think it seems to have worked so far because there's definitely been more engagement and some new folks using Perusall, although that might just be because its Malm and the book has a cool title, idk. I think we're going to stick with these kinds of books for the time being, then we'll see how it goes and maybe look at books that are a little more in-depth if there's an appetite for it.
We're always open to suggestions though. They won't always get in the next vote but we keep them in mind for further down the line. And books in the vote that don't win don't get discounted, we still pick those too. Like Fossil Capital, we thought of having that for this month but settled on HTBUAP instead, it was obviously a better fit for our criteria.
Are there any you'd like to recommend?
Honestly I was the one pushing for Malm last month, I'm not trying to only get what I want to read on the list more just suggesting a broad idea of not discounting books forever that didn't win a particular month's vote, they might win the next one if they had some momentum.
That being said, with the incoherent takes on sex work on this site I think Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant wouldn't be a terrible idea.