What Are You Reading?

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol*

The Game by Neil Strauss (Just for the story, not to learn how to be a PUA per se)*

Dark Matter by Juli Zeh*

Should be reading shakespeare**

Studying the theory of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by R.L. Stevenson**

Beginning Theory (for the above)**

*Entertainment

**Studying

Good so far, does for 'gender science' what Rose/Lewontin/Kamin's Not In Our Genes did for IQ testing, but doesn't have a class analysis, though I didn't expect one, she's writing purely asa psychologist.
If you wanna get background, listen to her appearance on ABC Radio's 'all in the mind' a few months back, just google it.

Added to reading list: Marxism and Literary Criticism by Terry Eagleton. For a subject I still hardly understand, the book is rather interesting albeit short.

Sorry just saw this. No I got a quarter of the way through then I started a post grad so it was put on hold! It was good, will get it out again when I am feeling brave.

Im reading Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco, its fecking awesome but depressing as hell.

Just finished Q. Quite good indeed. Strangely though, recently one very old turkish sociologist have been put on trial because he used letter "Q" in one of his articles... the prosecuter's claim was that this was a kind of "pkk propaganda"...

Then I started reading Engels' "peasant wars in Germany" for some background.

I think I will read "king rat" of China Melville now.

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and Hard Times by Charles Dickens.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy. A bit lazy in some respects and I thought not having apostrophes was just annoying rather than symbolic.

Perfume, story of a murderer - Suskind. Pretty good and a great concept but slightly lazy execution that left me a bit unsatisfied.

Odd Thomas. glib self-aware narrators don't usually wash but this one's growing on me.

At some point I will read my World book night books as well.

And I've been unemployed long enough I really should read some political stuff. Might finally translate some stuff.

Ya, same here. Putting the book on hold cuz I recently got into a book club and we're reading Crime and Punishment. Also reading Borkenau's The Spanish Cockpit on the side.

Read this when it first came out (had a thing for Klein for a bit). Nothing to write home about though imo.

I just read the Dispossed, which I enjoyed.

I haven't started it, but I recently found the bookThe Industrial Worker: 1840-1860 at a used bookstore. One of the complaints brought up in the Strike! discussion thread was that it barely discusses the era preceding the start of the book (1877) at all. I'm hoping that this book will dovetail nicely with Strike! and maybe help explain things better.

I thought she was a full on liberal activist and avoided her like the plague (never read No Logo) but I am actually really liking this. Its encouraged me to read David Harvey's History of Neo-Liberalism and 'Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC' next, which is probably no bad thing.

I should state that I didn't think it was bad. She's kinda attached to the anti-globy movement which is a mixed bag in itself. Some ok stuff, some very liberal activist stuff too. My last memory of the book though was the last chapter "shock wears off" where she discusses the rising 'left' in South American ' countering the neo-liberal policies from the North in parts. Well we know where this conversation goes...

I am reading the jam-packed Britain in the Nineteen Thirties by Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann, which brought me here because I wanted to know what the Trades Disputes Act was and I can't understand this sentence.

Please help!

Having heard about it on this thread, I too just read Out of the Night: The Memoir of Richard Julius Herman Krebs alias Jan Valtin. I highly recommend it.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick.

Dial 4 to make yourself want to dial.

The Allure of Machinic Life by John Johston.

Rosa Luxemburg by Peter Nettl. I can't say that I like it because the of this focus on individual charactheristics and fixation on Luxemburg's personality in explaining major historical processes. but it is fun to read all those details ... In general it is an easy going reading.

Did you try wiki? It states,

So civil servants no longer in the TUC and a ban of secondary picketing.

The Life and Times of Kitty Wilkinson by Michael Kelly. True story of a woman who lived in poverty, looked after homeless kids and turned her own home into a wash house for local people.

also recently read The Dispossed, and David harvey's 'Brief History of Neo-liberalism'
used to be really into Philip K. Dick in my pre-radical days. still quite like his books

the radical book i most enjoyed had to have been Society of the Spectacle (the ken knabb translation)

at the moment i'm reading Worker's Councils, which Pannekoek wrote under Nazi occupation.

Was it Dick who wrote that foul anti-abortion parable about a world where parents could get their kids aborted up to the age of 8 (or some such crap)? I've been holding it against him whether he wrote it or not.

Harrison, is that the one by Ursula Le Guin and is it any good?

Yep, its called "The Pre-Persons" and involves a society were kids are tested at 13 and those who fail are aborted, by the state not on choice of the parent.

It's not great, but it is looking at where you draw the line at what is human and what isnt', rather than pushing any agenda (the lack of an argument for and against or any kind of moralism is one of the most notable things about PKD). Although Dick has stated he is anti-abortion.

Anyway I'm reading A Scanner Darkly again and it's brilliant. Easily the best book on how society treats drugs and drug users

Really, I just dug out an anthology and a quick skim seemed to suggest the abortion trucks could only be brought in at the behest of the parents who decided they no longer wanted their kids around. It describes

Maybe you're right, I haven't read it for years so you could be right that I'm just remembering the tone badly.

Or maybe I bought an edition put out by an evangelical christian press?

yeah PKD was a libertarian, but not of the left kind. he loved Ayn Rand etc
hes still interesting to read though, because his life was so fucked up

yeah i enjoyed it, it actually made me think about a few things.
the fact she is an anarchist means it actually deals with real political quandaries as well as the more philosophic ones
i had been a bit sceptical about a fiction/sci-fi book about anarchists, but it turned out to be good.

Recently finished The Science of Pleasure: Cosmos and Psyche in the Bourgeois World View. The title is self-explanatory. Pretty difficult book, but I think I got something out of it. Gave me a fuller view of certain qualities of capitalist "rationality" that I felt before but couldn't point out clearly.

Currently making my way through "Ideology: An Introduction" by Terry Eagleton. I think it's very good and educational on the topic of ideology, but i've been reading it in too small chunks to follow it well due to lack of time.

PKD is great too. Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a fucked up in a good way.

Not sure about that at all,
"I'm with the little man. I wouldn't be with the "superman" characters for all the money in the world. You know, the characters in Ayn Rand and Heinlein who have such a contempt for everybody." PKD interview (quick google....)

I certainly don't see any relation to Randian Libertarianism in his writings, certainly there are no Superheroes, or suggestions of individualism.

As for anarchy sci-fi, there is a series of books called The Culture by Ian M Banks, which I haven't read but will, that are set place in a futuristic anarchist utopia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

I heartily recommend The Culture novels. It's not as meditative on anarchism is The Dispossessed; it's more of a background phenomenon. But still they are really good reads.

I might start Infinite Jest by a Wallace sometime later. Sounds very interesting..

I'm a bit skeptical about putting Dick as a libertarian. He really morphed a lot through different periods of time in his life.. Although, he certainly wasn't a revolutionary. I don't think he wasn't a capitalist/libertarian either.

An interesting point about him to note is that he shifted science fiction from matters of the epic wars of galactic aristocrats to the psychological turmoil of the working class within a world of commodity.

All of his characters are working class, which is reflection of his own experiences. The sympathies of his characters are that of the working class. His characters are workers. You'd find that his earlier pre-scifi work, like "Voices of the Street" reads like a working class realist novel.. and a reason that his later work is so accessible I think is this realist substratum at the core of who Dick was.. even if he also had his irrational alter-ego "Horselover Fat' the true believer. He didn't trust that either. Dick questioned himself. Constantly.

The conflict in his stories is often driven by the alienation of 'the black iron prison' of the spectacle, a demiurgic irreality. Like doll avatars that you transfer your consciousness into in order to escape boredom while at your job on a distant planet. Worlds where God comes in a spray can. You find a lot of questions about agency. You find someone dealing with being his own 'demiurge', in a sense that not only is he creating the narrative which he unleashes upon his characters. At the same time, they are independent from him in their commodity-form. That's what is engrossing about his work to me is a sort of living quality to the process he was going through which really comes through. His work is in a way about his life which was that of a tumultuous figure but one who was undoubtedly identified as working class, even if only perhaps implicitly by virtue of being working class.

Subjectively, he self-identified explicitly as a 'spiritual anarchist'.. but he did write a short story called "The Last of the Masters" which is about society after a global anarchist revolution.

(Oh yea! And this is my first post to this forum so Hello folks!)

http://www.naderlibrary.com/dick.phildickreader.6.htm