Right now I'm reading:

Bullshit Jobs (2018) by David Graeber - I loved Debt but had low expectations for this one and was reluctant to read it (I expected it would just be an extremely padded out version of the essay, which I liked). I'm enjoying it a lot more than I expected, and I'm reminded how skillful graeber was at gently taking a reader along and path that is unambiguously radical, yet each individual step on the path seems casual and reasonable.

Western Marxism (2017) by Domenico Losurdo - it's good. It's Losurdo, if you've read him before this is about the same - very rigorous and orderly arguments that lead to some very powerful insights. I'm only 100 pages in so far but liking it and feel that this new English text might become a vital text once it gets read more widely

Exhalation (2019) by Ted Chiang. Science fiction short stories by one of the best to do it rn. I'm about halfway through, so far I enjoyed his first collection more (Story of Your Life and Others). I liked the first story quite a lot (The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate) but most of the rest of what I've read so has been dominated by one 100 page novella that felt kind of weak for the amount of real estate it takes up. I've heard a few of the later stories are real bangers though so maybe it will balance out.

As for what I'm excited to read next, I'm kind of spinning my wheels a bit. Might do Washington Bullets by Vijay Prishad, or maybe some Strugatsky Brothers. Open to suggestions!

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    1 day ago

    I finished State and Revolution last weekend. Interesting. Despite not knowing a lot of who he was referencing, I still found Lenin rather approachable.

    I read Cuckoo... last month, I think. Pretty good. Strong IT energy.

    Not sure what I'm reading next, but The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelman is giving me the stink eye from my bookshelf. Kinda want some fictional slop though...

    • roux [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      1 day ago

      I'm reading the Anarcho-syndicalism book by Rudolf Rocker right now. It's mostly a history book and not a lot of theory so that kind of sucks.

      Next up is a little book called Conquest of Bread by Mr. kropotkin. It's about damn time too.

        • roux [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          17 hours ago

          Hell yeah!

          Something about anarchist audiobooks ripped from Audible makes me giggle lol.

          Idk how much work this all is but is there any way you could get these set up as video by chapter? I know some audios do and some don't. But I assume it's also based off of what you can find, right?

          • ReadFanon [any, any]
            ·
            17 hours ago

            Yeah, these ones came as one whole mp3 without any chapter divisions which is a pain. What that means is either listening to it and manually entering each chapter or there's a possibility that you'd be able to analyse the waveform to identify the breaks in speaking between chapters but that's above my pay grade - I don't know the first thing about audio engineering. So it's going to be a tough slog.

            Not to be a jerk about it but I've got better things to do than to listen to 30 hours of anarchist works lmao. I say this mostly because I'm an ex-anarchist so I've read most of these already whereas by comparison I'm way behind on my Marxist theory. Probably should have led with that info.

            I'm kinda waiting for someone to come along and list the chapters in timestamps in the comments tbh. But hey, TankieTube has some of the core anarchist texts in audiobook format available free on the clearnet so I think that's a pretty good start.

              • ReadFanon [any, any]
                ·
                17 hours ago

                Oh right, I get you. Sorry, I'm good at semantics but I always trip up over pragmatics kitty-birthday-sad

                • roux [he/him, they/them]
                  ·
                  14 hours ago

                  I guess rereading my question, I was asking you. That's me posting before coffee lol. I think I meant trying to find audio rips with chapters. I know Spotify does have Conquest in broken up into chapters. I donno how to pull that off of Spotify but I bet there is a free version floating around.

                  Sorry about the pre-coffee brain fart rofl.

                  • ReadFanon [any, any]
                    ·
                    2 hours ago

                    You're alright, I figured it was just that rhetorical you in the way that people will say "Why can't you just buy one streaming service - how come you have to get 5 just to have something decent to watch?" but it's you a personal you it's just that people no longer say "Why can't one just buy a single streaming service?", except if they're some Eton scholar bougie fuck.

                    No harm, no foul.

        • roux [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          1 day ago

          I just realized my comment was meant to be a parent comment but for some reason my brain made me reply to your comment. I'm a dummy lol.

        • roux [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          1 day ago

          I'm kind of hoping to jump into Mutual Aid after. I ended up getting all of his 4 book collection on Amazon Kindle a while back for free because I ended up with some credits.