Finally picked up Grapes of Wrath, and damn is it good. Steinbeck has such beautiful prose when he's not writing southern dialect.
What other classics are still compelling today? If it's any help, I don't really dig Vonnegut, Asimov, and Huxley.
If you want to stick with some more Steinbeck check out East of Eden. One the best books I’ve ever read. I like Steinbeck a lot though. Also, Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Connor are excellent
East of Eden is the novel I come back to every couple of years. Life's circumstances always alters the meaning of the text.
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People" are so fucking good. Flannery rules.
In the reading days of my youth I remember liking Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
Also autocorrect tried to change his name to Ray Headbutt :data-laughing:
I remember really liking Fahrenheit 451 in high school, but I also liked The Fountainhead back then as well :shrug-outta-hecks: . Adding this.
Bradbury is a great suggestion. I really loved Dandelion Wine when I read it. As I recall, it's pretty episodic, so it's an easy one to pick up and put down if you just have a short time to read.
Steinbeck's Of Mice & Men is a good quick read.
I still think To Kill a Mockingbird and Great Gatsby hold up well.
And the Waters Still Run by Angie Debo might be up your alley.
Have heard good things about The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah but personally have not read it yet.
And the Waters Still Run
I've never heard of this, but anything that was kept off the shelves due to "libel" against politicians is probably worth picking up. I have already read the others you've mentioned.
Yeah, if i'm stuck for something to read WoTW is one of my go-to's - I rattle through it a couple of times a year and never becomes stale.
It may have been really stupid, but it was also really funny that he said he was more left-wing than Stalin...to Stalin's face.
For those that don't know:
Stalin's response was essentially "my bro, I fought and won an actual revolution and you want people to vote for democrats. Get the fuck out of here, but also thanks for stopping by."
:stalin-cig:
If only Stalin knew about the navy seal copy pasta.
:deeper-sadness:
The lead-up is so much funnier. Wells opens by asking Stalin how thrilled he is that a socialist is in power in the US, referring to Roosevelt, and you can just hear Stalin's depressed sigh that he's having this conversation with a western leftist again.
I've been reading Monte Cristo and its still good, though its kinda long as fuck
I actually have a copy of it in my room that I picked out of a trash can once. Been putting it off due to it being thicker than my arm. Might try to make it my summer read.
It's definitely a commitment and its not an easy read. But its very well written and even kind of funny at times
I found the second half far less interesting than the first personally.
I'd say this one too, the prose is amazing once you pick up the vibe
china mieville is a really good socialist author. here's a cool list: https://fantasticmetropolis.com/i/50socialist
mirror: https://libcom.org/article/50-sci-fi-fantasy-works-every-socialist-should-read-china-mieville
dispossessed by le guin should be on the list too i think
prettys ur eyou can get full text of almost any on google / piratebay. can open/read ebooks with calibre and you're good to go.
You said you don't like Asimov but Foundation is so good it's like Dialectical Materialism: The Sci Fi Story
Fundamentally changed my understanding of the world, in the best way.
I did read Asimov a lot as kid, not Foundation though. That I picked up only when I was a Marxist and its gender roles and great man theory did chafe me the wrong way. Though I am happy that it works for you and Green Tea :)
What great man theory? The only great man applicable would be Seldon and all he did was The Math, everything else was based on any needed individuals arising as a result of material circumstances, which drive everything, which is the opposite of great man theory?
I may try it at a later date, but I, Robot was pretty meh compared to its reputation.
I just finished reading Bram Stoker's Dracula and thought it was one of the best out of the Gothic horror canon. It's written in a really interesting way and makes good commentary about British anxieties about imperial decline. Also obligatory recommendation for The Brothers Karamazov.
I'm only going to list books that are legitimately fun and (mostly) easy to read. All of this is obviously IMO.
Gogol is extremely funny and the most fun, interesting, and creative of all the classic Russian writers. The Overcoat is obviously really good but you really can't go wrong with anything Gogol wrote. The Government Inspector, his short stories, Dead Souls, they're all awesome.
Lovecraft is fun, interesting, and weird. Yes, he's a racist, but he has a socialist redemption arc. At The Mountains of Madness is amazing.
Octavia Butler is fun, easy, and disturbing. Kindred is great, Parable of the Sower feels like it was written yesterday although it's thirty years old.
Zola has been recommended here a few times, I've read a bunch of his books and really like him a lot. He's always really concerned with the French working class in the 19th century. His issue is that he libs out whenever things get really interesting. Germinal is a legitimate classic and the movie is on Amazon Prime and is arguably better than the book. L'Assommoir is also really really good.
Ovid was recommended already, check out the imagist translation by Charles Boer, it's pretty wild. Virtually any translation of Homer is also awesome. Gilgamesh is also really great. This shit has been around for thousands of years for a reason.
A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o a great anti-colonial classic that was recommended to me here. Pairs well with Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War also recommended here, about the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese perspective.
Paradise Lost is absolutely beautiful, really fun and interesting, obviously not the easiest read. I picked up an edition that has a ton of great footnotes so I recommend finding one like that if you can. It's basically like if Shakespeare was a hardcore fucking nerd who was way more educated but also trapped in his house for years malding over his side losing the English Civil War.
Joyce is truly wonderful but really makes you work for it, at least with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I've only read a few pages of the latter; the former is a lot more understandable if you pair it with the various books that have been written to explain it, which are almost classics in their own right (Stuart Gilbert, Richard Ellmore—there's another book out there, I can't remember the name, that does almost a line-by-line explanation for Ulysses, and as it turns out, shitloads of the book are basically references to Irish ballads, because Joyce was also a really good singer and his whole family was obsessed with singing). Although actually there are still many large sections of Ulysses which are almost incomprehensible. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist are obviously much easier and more approachable.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a Chinese classic that is a huge deal in East Asia, is really fun and wild, though virtually unknown in western countries.
Marquez and Shakespeare have already been mentioned, but definitely check out Kozintsev’s Soviet adaptations of Hamlet and King Lear, they’re amazing.
Seconding Octavia Butler. Her Seed to Harvest/Patternmaster series is very interesting, if a bit more amateurish than her later stuff, but her Xenogenesis trilogy? Groundbreaking stuff. Really plays around a lot with xenophobia as a psychological/emotional concept, and how it feeds tribalism and racism. Honestly one of the more unique alien species out there too. Nothing else is like the Oankali.
Really really really cannot recommend Zola. He was a right-wing pedophile and proto-eugenecist. And his characters are paper thin and drab. Some of his crowd scenes stand out. You should read 'The Red and the Black' for a humanist portrait of France around the revolution, or 'Growth of the Soil' by Knut Hamsun if you need a chud writing irl minecraft fanfic.
That's fair and I agree especially in the case of Hamsun. I don't agree with Zola though thinking specifically of 'La Terre'. (CW: SA, Pedophilia)
spoiler
Which follows around a teenager who is repeatedly and graphically sexually assaulted and admits on her death bed she loves her greatest abuser and is envious of her sister for marrying him.
I concede my original critique was kneejerk and not well explained.
Yeesh, I started La Terre but didn't get that far. And yes, Zola's eugenicist ideas are weird. Like I said, he libs out sometimes. He did stick his neck out during the Dreyfus affair, however, and he was probably assassinated for it.
If you want to go old-school, The Decameron has so many great archetypal stories of all sorts.
The film version by Passolini is also great. Passolini was a communist so you can detect it in most of his work, most obviously in Salo
Salo really bait and switched me. fuck that movie everyone hypes it up with flowery shit about transgressiveness, antifascist themes etc
:dead-dove-3: wait that was just 2 hours of softcore fetish porn :dead-dove-3:
It's certainly not for everyone, but Passolini was a genius. He also wrote amazing poetry, novels, theory, etc.
Did you ever see 'The Little Hours'? Really fun witchy sapphic stitchup of a few of the stories from the decameron. Fair warning it has a franco in it...
I remember when it came out but I didn't know it was a Decameron adaptation until a few months ago. Been meaning to watch it.
Unfortunately often times depictions of the grotesque nature of our reality ironically distracts from the reality itself.
