I read 25 titles over the year, split about evenly between non-fiction and fiction. I'll only mention the non-fic here.

The Great (in alphabetic order)

If We Burn by Vincent Bevins - not much to add on this text that hasn't already been said. It's as good as people say and as valuable an analysis as a liberal is likely to offer. If you're actively organizing rn (and if you're not what are you doing) this is a really good text to cover with your comrades or just by yourself.

Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Fererici - what a surprise this book fucking cooks. Very rich text. I think some people who haven't read it assume the "witch" part of the title is dominant and overlook the "Caliban" part, this is not simply a text on Marxist feminism (not to belittle texts that are), but really a much grander effort to discuss the psychosocial changes that were/are required of a pre-capitalist society to turn it into a capitalist one. Very cool text, she's a very cool lady with a lot to say.

The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World by Vijay Prishad - a people's history of the Non-Aligned Movement. A lot of his later texts are poorly-cited pamphlets but this earlier work is very serious, incredibly thoughtful and artful constructed. It's easy to imagine a version of this book being that is a bunch of sprawling facts as it involves like 80 different counties but he organizes the book by concept (like developmental economics, the cultural question, IMF and World Bank, Saudi exportation of Wahhabist islam as a counter to secular Arab nationalism) and centers each chapter around a city that acts as a metonym for the idea, then expands the chapter to other areas that had significant movements with respect to the idea. Highly recommended.

The Tenant Class by Ricardo Tranjan - great short and accessible text by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on the fundamental contradiction of solving a housing crisis without addressing housing as an asset. If you're a leftist living in C*nada you're probably doing some organizing around housing, this is a must for sure. Really crystallizes in simple language a lot of important points, and the citations are a goldmine - specifically Canadian statistics and reporting.

The Good

Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire - this shit rocks. A little sprawling but definitely fire. Almost more poetry than theory.

Bullshit Jobs 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 enjoyed it a lot more than I expected, and I'm reminded how skillful was at gently taking a reader along and path that is unambiguously radical, yet each individual step on the path seems casual and reasonable. Easy read.

Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel - like the above, this was surprisingly high quality and a very easy read (I think I knocked it out in like 4 days and I'm a slow reader). Much more bold than I expected, he began his argument paraphrasing Federici's key arguments from Caliban and the Witch, asking readers to consider that the manner in which we have grown to think about ourselves as removed from the environment is a relatively new manner of thinking that coincided with the birth of capitalism, and a successful effort to overcome fossil capital will also require an effort to undo this view of the Earth as an instrument for us as opposed to something we're a part of. Most of the rest is just a well-articulated outline of the degrowth argument which you may already be familiar with.

Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo - very cool, but can be a little plodding at times. I don't think I knew just how much of the text would be focused not just on liberal societies but writings of 18th century liberal philosophers. Nonetheless I think everyone here should read it eventually as it does outline a pretty important argument about liberalism that is built upon in...

Western Marxism by Domenico Losurdo - great text and important. Again a little slow and drawn out. There is a 30 page transcription of the speech this text was based on attached in the Appendix, and I wonder how well it would do to just read that.

The Decent

Annihilation of Caste by B.R. Ambedkar - this guy was cool, he was a liberal ultimately but still very cool to read this text and the supporting documentation around it (I read the Verso version with the Arunduthi Roy 120 page essay on him and Ghandi, plus other flavour to expand on the context.) Glad I read it.

Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein - really has its ups and downs. There are some interesting arguments in here, but also a lot of just reading about a rich liberal's relationship to Twitter. She's better on Israel than I would have expected and dedicated two chapters to antizionism which I was surprised by.

The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy by Art Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson - good and fiery, but maybe a little off-the-cuff in some ways. If you live in C*nada you should probably read it some time but it's not the first text on the topic I'd recommend.

Wage Labour and Capital Karl Marx - I often struggle with Marx's prose and I'm much more of an Engels guy. I also often feel like reading these original texts is a bit of a waste of time tbh, like basically no physicist would ever sit down and read Newton's Principia, reading the original text requires quite a lot of labour and the extra value you get out of doing so is questionable at best. (Hot take I know but w/e just being honest)

Wouldn't Recommend

Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis - There is some good stuff in here but I was hoping for a lot more analysis. The pages were stuffed instead with example after example of barbaric suffering of those enduring famine. I don't mind reading about those kind of things but was really hoping he'd do a lot more with the space he had. I don't think Mike Davis is for me.

Looking Forward to reading in 2025

I'm part way through Andreas Malm's new book Overshoot which is really great so far. I think if there's one theorist who I think is underread I think it's Malm, he's the only one I see writing about the climate apocalypse with anything approaching the urgency of the task at hand, and his writing is incisive.

Also looking to maybe read Piketty's Capital and Ideology, Losurdo's Class Struggle, and some Strugatsky Brothers. Open to recommendations though!