For all books - fiction and non-fiction.
Fiction or Non-Fiction, academic or casual, theory or non-theory, feel free to mention books of any genre and on any topic.
What Is To Be Done & State and Revolution. I am constantly pushing it off. Typical for someone with ADHD. Not to mention re-reading even the introductory manifesto because I constantly feel insecure that I didn't absorb it.
Have you tried the 'q&a' method?
I assume you mean testing oneself using questions of the book(s)? No, I haven't find any test to do that, nor have I made one myself. Thank you though because it never came to mind I could try that method, anything that gets rid of that insecurity would help free up the backlog for more material.
You could try what I do. I keep a paper notebook or a notepad app on my phone, or pc with me when I read the text. After a paragraph or a chapter, I write down all the possible questions that can be created. After finish reading the book or a significant portion of the book, I try to write down all the answers to those questions.
I do something similar, I read the whole thing first though. It's just such a problem to even start it or get to writing afterwards. Especially since I've been off medicine for around a month. Though, I was thinking of printing the material out on expendable paper and writing on it, and make notes as you've described yours.
Nice idea. Good luck. I use notion (FOSS alternative: Joplin) to create collapsible questions and Answers like this.
[Sample question]?
[Sample answer].
Thanks for the Joplin suggestion. I immediately got into writing down what I read in "What Is To Be Done?", feeling less insecure and more confident about it. Finally medicated too, so that helps. Thanks, comrade.
I've been reading The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara. Kinda boring not going to lie. I'm almost done with it, hopefully it has an exciting ending
Yeah, I think Dr. Che never expected his personal journal to be published worldwide one day. That's why he didn't use any riveting language or vivid description. It was like a collection of personal accounts of the events he archived for himself.
The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal DΓaz. I'm only 30-40 pages in but the casualness of colonialism is stark. DΓaz regularly mentions coming across land features new to the spaniards and he'll say something like, "this river was named Tabasco by the natives but we decided to name it Rio de Lopez after my homie because he saw it first and it is known by this name on the maps". His first interaction with natives involved being asked by the Governer of Cuba to raid a nearby village and make the people into slaves. Another time they came across a "beautiful native woman" and at the end of their interarction he says, "and she came with us" only to not be mentioned again. I am incredibly doubtful they asked at all. He writes all this decades after he experienced it and as someone who has family who were in US military the way he talks about it is disturbingly familiar.
Trying to push through the last 20% of Capital vol 2. Hit a major roadblock alongside huge increases in responsibilities and duties, but should be able to close it out.
Good luck!
I have been reading The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett this week. It's a fun detective duo fantasy mystery.
How long is the average reading time for this?
It's a bit over 400 pages. I don't track my reading time but I probably need about two weeks to get through a novel of that length.
If you wanna be notified for the upcoming weekly threads, just reply to this comment with 'yes' or 'y'. I will assume you want to be added to a notification list. If you want to be removed from the list, you can reply to this or DM me.
The Notification List so far
/u/vema@lemmygrad.ml
yes
No god but God by Reza Aslan. Its a book about the origins of Islam and its core beliefs.
Its crazy the sort of things we are told about the worlds largest religion and how monolithic a presentation we get in the west. And I know that it isn't what I have been told but I still haven't really figured out what Islam really is.
So this book is kinda helpful in breaking the misconceptions I have.
Sounds interesting!
It gets really liberal at the end.
Treasure island. Just a fun adventure book while I'm learning knitting.
Almost done "The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class Against Fascism" and started "Wage Labour and Capital"
I really like the Dimitrov's discussion on the different frameworks fascists adopt in order to establish the terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary sections of finance capital. Really coalesced some things for me.
His discussion on the United Front and the Youth was really cool as well. I've been thinking about how to get more involved in my community and how to get more young people mobilized and engaged with politics so his writing is interesting. On Education by N.K. Krupskaya is also a collection of speeches/writings I visit from time to time for the same purpose.
Wage Labour and Capital helps me fall asleep :/
The Deerslayer by JF Cooper. i read it in translation when i was like 10, and i liked it.
hooo boy, as an adult. hooooooo boy. i can definitely see why it's not popular kid's literature in the US. you have to be able to put up with absurdly convoluted sentences like
Had there been a temple reared to god, in that solitary wilderness, its clock would have told the hour of midnight as the party set forth on their expedition.
and that's the narrator. the characters are written in what is presumably an attempt to represent their accent, so "certain" is "sartain", "point" is "p'int", etc.
also the book cant go one page without a white character calling a native american "savage" and dreaming about murdering their children. i mean, it's probably an accurate portrayal of whites in the 1700s NY frontier, but uh.
Currently reading:
Reading these (among other things) as I am trying to expand the settler colonialism page on ProleWiki, focusing for the moment on the mechanisms of settler colonialism. So far I am only a few chapters into each.
In the same vein, I recently read Late Homesteading: Native Land Dispossession through Strategic Occupation, which is a study of "homesteading" in the US, particularly the period where the bulk of settler expansion under the Homestead Acts took place, 1900-1930. The study asserts that this wave was driven by the strategic goal of having settlers physically occupying the land so it would make the "enormous and questionable land transfers" of the late 1800s much harder to reverse:
quotes from Late Homesteading
βWe claim that the value of homesteading to the federal government always came from one key feature: homesteaders had to live on the land. When land was occupied, homes and barns were built, roads and stores arose, a certain type of development took place, and eventually population growth and cities made βgoing backβ impossible. In the words of Justice Ginsburg, this would ββ¦preclude the Tribe from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.ββ
[W]hy would the state be interested in allowing homesteaders on these lands rather than cash entrants? An alternative policy might have been to hold the lands until land values increased to the point where cash entrants were willing to purchase them, and thus avoid the dissipation of rushing. [...] The answer is found in the signature characteristic of homesteading: occupation by actual settlers. Settler occupation disrupted tribal land uses, physical development, and infrastructure; it also created vested political interests in maintaining non-native settlement. These irreversible effects of settlement meant that even a future legal loss could only result in a payment to tribes, not the return of the land. This reduction of the tribal land base furthered federal efforts to continually diminish tribesβ sovereignty, which was inextricably linked to their ownership of the lands that comprised their territories (Carlos, Feir, and Redish 2022). By using homesteading to occupy these particular lands, any legal threats against dispossession became moot; any future court settlement effectively became a forced sale of the land. Thus, the federal state strategically allowed homesteading to continue in order to solidify the transfer of lands away from tribes. This strategy complemented the various political forces that wanted lands to remain in the hands of non-native settlers.
In the past I was reading a bit of From the Barrel of a Gun: the United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980 by Gerald Horne. I'll probably pick it up again at some point.
Reading these (among other things) as I am trying to expand the settler colonialism page on ProleWiki,
Thank you for your valuable contribution, comrade! π«‘
π«‘
"Killing Hope" by William Blum and a book about development of video games with narrative, but didn't read a lot recently due to studying.