Books

Reading Monkey rn,. the abridged trandlated version of journey to the west. Its pretty amazing tbh

Still trucking through Wretched of the Earth, want to reinforce my understanding of the class struggle in colonial and neocolonial settings.

I just finished "Tokyo Express" by Seicho Matsumoto. Just started with "Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants" by Garrett Ryan. Also just bought "Oorlogsmythen" by Ewald Engelen, an anti-war (propaganda) book a comrade recommended to me.

Are there any comrades here that have read "De laatste dagen van het oude normaal" by Peter Mertens? I have heard a lot of good things about the book but don't really know him.

Two hilarious quotes from Fraud, Famine, and Fascism:

"Although Dalrymple admits 'that there has been some question as to the existence and magnitude of the famine,' he hastily discredits those whose reports beg to differ, declaring: 'those who did not 'see' the famine may be divided into two groups: those who for one reason or another actually did not see it; and those who saw the famine but did not report it.' Having established that he can count to two, Dalrymple has from the start ..."

"One gets a more graphic sense of the unscientific nature of such statistical manipulation by projecting a hypothetical famine-genocide onto population trends in the province of Saskatchewan. ... Citing such statistical 'proof', some might argue that the capitalists committed deliberate genocide against the population of Saskatchewan in the 1930s so as to suppress the militant resistance of prairie farmers and workers, whose lives were being ruined by economic depression. Suppression of the masses' struggle - such as the RCMP attack on the Estevan strikers or the bloodshed inflicted on the unemployed Trekkers in Regina - could be cited, not to mention the mass eviction of poor tenants and farm foreclosures."

I have been reading a textbook titled Marieb Human Anatomy and Physiology. It's for college. It's actually very interesting.

gonna read lust for life

Finished House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski late last week, then read a 70s crime/heist novel called Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake over the weekend. Now I'm reading Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers.

House of Leaves was a horror novel that was also a very weird parody of academic writing. I may come back and read it again in the future and it did make me want to delve further into ergodic literature - literature that requires non-trivial effort just to read (a couple other examples I'm aware of are Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall). On the horror front, to me, it wasn't particularly scary at all. It was extremely metatextual and made me frequently consider what was actually real inside the books universe - there are multiple layers to the narrative and there is the legitimate possibility that even within the book's universe, almost everything in the book is fake. I think it even goes so far as to essentially make the book a metaphor for itself and makes the reader a character or entity within the book.

Hot Rocks was a much simpler book to read. It really felt almost like reading a movie. A very needed reprieve after House of Leaves. It is a pretty funny story - basically a group of thieves are hired to steal an emerald and end up having to pull off a multitude of different capers due to bad luck leaving them without the rock each time.

Wage, labour and capital and An Extremely Condensed Summary of Capital at the same time. Both are short, yet it's taking me days to get through them because the ideas are so thick and fundamental that I need to gradually absorb them. I feel like I will probably need to re-read these pieces along with Value, Price, and Profit multiple times.

i havent been reading much recently unfortunately, i have alot of self esteem issues tied to reading consistently and end up kind of panicking after a few days and sorta spiralling out of control, and these days have been particularly hard in that particular aspect.

been reading Elementary Principles of Philosophy! i barely have enough time for anything now sadly, but been trying to read a few pages every day i can. It's very easy to read and handle, too. Only finished a fifth so far but learned a lot.

Started reading capital a week ago. Got the unabridged edition all three volumes in one book, shit is chunky and the text is tiny. Honestly it's way less of a slog than I expected. It can be a bit boring but it isn't hard to understand. Thank you carl mark

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