More a question as to what it's doing for folks here, how it rows your boat and what boat it rows. — tim wood

Rather than a boat-rowing metaphor, I like the idea of scratching an itch. Sometimes that itch is too hard to reach, so I use a back scratcher, which would be a book. Hopefully it's not too sharp or too fast, like a chain saw. I'm not that tough.

I like a tree with the bark on. Something that stands still, and solid, while I work on it. AHHHH! A little lower! Perfect!

I've had a hard time finding the perfect tree. I thought of planting a few my own self, and I actually did; twenty years ago, even. But they still aren't throwing shade, or scratching any backs but my own. So I turn to others in the old growth forest.

But I hear chainsaws in the distance.

Just read and currently reading, with detailed emoji reviews.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities :up: :starstruck: :sparkle:
Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature :up: :down: :yawn:
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness :up: :down: :yawn:
Nikolai Gogol, Petersburg Tales :up: :lol: :love:
Samuel Beckett, Molloy :up: :100: :death: :rofl: :sparkle: :love:

Just read and currently reading, with detailed emoji reviews. — jamalrob

:up: :100: :sparkle: :starstruck: :cool:

Simples for Short Story Competition :party:

Treblinka, Jean-François Steiner

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities :up: :starstruck: :sparkle:

Samuel Beckett, Molloy :up: :100: :death: :rofl: :sparkle: :love: — jamalrob

:cool:

None So Fit to Break the Chains: Marx’s Ethics of Self-Emancipation by Dan Swain

:cool: — 180 Proof

I think I've had Molloy on my reading list since I noticed you saying something about it years ago, either here or on the old forum. So, thanks. :cool:

(Now the pointlessness and stupidity of my existence is confirmed beyond doubt :wink:)

:smirk:

Treblinka was unbelievably good. Holy fuck

I am presently reading "Techgnosis" by Eric Davis.

Classical Indian Philosophy vol. 5, P. Adamson & J. Ganeri

I read Solaris by Stanislaw Lem a while back, it was pretty decent.

Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, Gitta Sereny

Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, vol 2,
Adrian Johnston

Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
by Herbert Marcuse

Just finished Voltaire’s Candide (Adams edition). This paragraph made me think of this forum so well, I thought I would reproduce it here:

“While Candide, the baron, Pangloss, Martin, and Cacambo were telling one another their stories, while they were disputing over the contingent or non-contingent events of this universe, while they were arguing over effects and causes, over moral and physical evil, over liberty and necessity, and over the consolations available to one in a Turkish galley, they arrived at the shores of Propontis and the house of the prince of Transylvania. The first sight to meet their eyes was Cunegonde and the old woman, who were hanging out towels on lines to dry.

“The baron paled at what he saw. The tender lover Candide, seeing his lovely Cunegonde with her skin weathered, her eyes bloodshot, her breasts fallen, her cheeks seamed, her arms red and scaly, recoiled three steps in horror, and then advanced only out of politeness...”

Foundations Of Cognitive Science
by Michael I. Posner (Editor)

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Yitzhak Arad

Alternating between:

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke

New Essays on Human Understanding by G.W. Leibniz

And, of course, fiction:

Sunflower by Tex Gresham

About 1/3 through Theories of Ideology by Jan Rehmann (excellent btw), which will likely be the last book I start in this year, so time for another annual roundup.

• Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages by Ellen Meiksins Wood
• Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment by Ellen Meiksins Wood
• Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric Robinson
• Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
• The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood (reread)
• Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo
• The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by Franco Moretti
• Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict in American History by Steve Fraser
• How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu
• Portraits: John Berger on Artists by John Berger
• The Pristine Culture of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood
• Democracy Against Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood
• Studies On Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production edited by Andrea Zingarelli and Laura da Graca
• What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 by historian Daniel Walker Howe
• Marx's Capital and Hegel's Logic: A Reexamination edited by Fred Moseley and Tony Smith
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? by Neil Davidson
• The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins
• Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai
• Bela Tarr, the Time After by Jacques Rancière
• Monsters of the Market Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism by David McNally
• Faust by Goethe
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
• Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai
• Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism by Melinda Cooper
• Comments on the Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
• Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson
• None So Fit to Break the Chains: Marx’s Ethics of Self-Emancipation by Dan Swain
• Theories of Ideology by Jan Rehmann

End of year list! 46 Books, 16 not by white men. Definitely taken a turn towards political economy and history this year, and I think the plan will be to try to get back to more philosophy next year, tho we'll see how that goes. Titles in bold are favorites. Starred titles were disappointments. Happy reading for the New Year all!

History

• Ellen Meiksins Wood - Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
• Ellen Meiksins Wood - Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment
• Ellen Meiksins Wood - Empire of Capital
• Jairus Banaji - A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism
• Jairus Banaji - Theory As History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation

Political Economy

• Giovanni Arrighi - Adam Smith In Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century
• Giovanni Arrighi - The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times
• Michael Hudson - Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
• Robert Brenner - The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy
• Robert Brenner - The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005
• Tony Norfield - The City: Global Finance and the City of London
• Radhika Desai - Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization, and Empire
• Michael Roberts - The Long Depression: Marxism and The Global Crisis of Capitalism
• John Smith - Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis
• Intan Suwandi - Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism
• Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo – The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
• Nick Srnicek - Platform Capitalism
• McKenzie Wark - Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse?***
• Arundhati Roy - The Cost of Living
• Arundhati Roy - The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile

States and Revolution

• Theda Skocpol - States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
• Neil Davidson - How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?
• Charles Tilly - Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990-1992
• James C. Scott - Against The Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
• James C. Scott - Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
• Hendrik Spruyt - The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of System Change
• Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski - People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism

Anthropology and Structuralism

• Georges Dumezil - The Destiny of a King
• Georges Dumezil - The Plight of the Sorcerer
• Georges Dumezil - The Destiny of the Warrior
• Georges Dumezil - Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty
• Marshall Sahlins - Stone Age Economics
• Marshall Sahlins - Islands of History
• Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Vladimir Propp - Morphology of the Folktale
• Roland Barthes - Elements of Semiology
• Roland Barthes - The Pleasure of the Text
• Claude Levi-Strauss - Myth and Meaning

Mostly Philosophy

• Albert O. Hirschman - The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy
• Gilles Deleuze - Foucault
• Gilles Deleuze - The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
• Charles W. Mills - The Racial Contract
• Jon Roffe - Abstract Market Theory
• Michel de Certeau - The Practice of Everyday Life (Reread)
• Hito Steyerl - The Wretched of the Screen
• Kathryn Yusoff - A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None***

Nice list! I'm about to finish Suwandi's Value Chains and when I'll do I'll do a quick write up of that and Smith's Imperialism. Did you like Family Values?

Nice list, never ceases to impress and perplex me on how you manage to read over 40 books a year, each year.

Loved Family Values; the chapter on Inflation was particularly enlightening.

2021 readings (started, most but not all I've finished)

[M] - memoir, auto/biography
[L] - literary re: poetry, novel, short fiction

• Classical Indian Philosophy, vol. 5, P. Adamson & J. Ganeri
• Searching For Whitopia, Rich Benjamin
• The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey, Paul Broks
• Holes and Other Superficialities, R. Casati & A.C. Varzi
• Razorblade Tears: A Novel, S.A. Cosby [L]
• Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, Antonio Damasio
• In the Presence of Absence, Mahmoud Darwish [L]
• How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now, Stanislas Dehaene
• A History of the Goddess: From the Ice Age to the Bible, Edward Dodge
• The Ethical Slut (3rd Edition), D. Easton & J. Hardy [M]
• John Rawls: Reticent Socialist, William A. Edmundson
• The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber & David Wengrow
• Skepticism and Mysticism: On Mauthner's Critique of Language by Gustav Landauer 1903, David Grunwald
• From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe, Michel Henry
• Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, Michel Henry
• The Self-Assembling Brain: How Neural Networks Grow Smarter, Peter Robin Hiesinger
• The Nature of Middle-Earth by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Carl F. Hostetter [L]
• Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro [L]
• New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656, David Ives
• Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour, Rickie Lee Jones [M]
• The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr [L]
• The Framer's Coup, Michael J. Klarman
• The Good Old Days, eds. E. Klee, W. Dressen, & V. Riess
• The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, Kōjin Karatani
• Chasing Homer, László Krasznahorkai [L]
• Set the Night on Fire, Robby Krieger [M]
• Exterminate All The Brutes, Sven Lindqvist
• The Psychology of Stupidity, ed. Jean-François Marmion
• Agon, J. Harper & S. Nittner (ttrpg)
• A Quantum Life, Hakeem M. Olesuyi [M]
• The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Kenneth Patchen [L]
• The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot: Philosophy As Practice, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson
• Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas, ed. Eugene Redman [L]
• The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, Ritchie Robertson
• Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli
• After Capitalism (New 2nd Edition), David Schweickart
• The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Frank Stanford [L]
• The Anomaly, Hervé Le Tellier [L]
• Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History, Peter Turchin
• Mama's Last Hug, Frans de Waal
• Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir [L]
• Zone One, Colson Whitehead [L]
• Hitler's American Model, James Q. Whitman
• Big White Ghetto, Kevin D. Williamson

Madness & Civilization by Michel Foucault
A fitting start to 2022?

My 2021 readings, in chronological order:

• First Principles by Herbert Spencer
• Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
• Ideology And Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge by Karl Mannheim
• The Intellectuals and The Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia by John Carey
• Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham H. Maslow
• The Antiquary by Walter Scott
• An Essay on Metaphysics by R.G. Collingwood
• The Metaphysics of Pragmatism by Sidney Hook
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger
• Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
• The Constitution of the Human Being by Max Scheler
• On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing: Selected Writings by Max Scheler
• The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
• Selected Philosophical Essays by Max Scheler
• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
• The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley
• Reform or Revolution & Other Writings (Books on History, Political & Social Science) by Rosa Luxemburg
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
• On Individuality and Social Forms by Georg Simmel
• Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
• The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope
• The Epic of Gilgamesh by Unknown
• Descriptive Psychology by Franz Brentano
• The Idea of Nature by R.G. Collingwood
• The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
• Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead
• Adventures of Ideas by Alfred North Whitehead
• Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
• The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David J. Chalmers
• Naming and Necessity by Saul A. Kripke
• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio
• Damasio's Error and Descartes' Truth: An Inquiry into Consciousness, Metaphysics, and Epistemology by Andrew Gluck
• The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding by Humberto R. Maturana
• The Psychology of Intelligence by Jean Piaget
• De Anima (On the Soul) by Aristotle
• Philosophy of Existence by Karl Jaspers
• Story of Psychology, The by Morton Hunt
• The Origin and Goal of History by Karl Jaspers
• Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud by Herbert Marcuse

My 2021 readings in no particular order, though there are some omissions that I don't remember at the moment. Favorites are in bold:

Fiction:

• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy
• All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
• Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• Animal Farm, George Orwell
• Brave New World, Alduous Huxley
• We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
• The Iron Heel, Jack London
• The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
• It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclaire Lewis
• The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
• Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
• The Drowned World, J. G. Ballard
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
• Neuromancer, William Gibson
• Starship Troopers, Robert Hein
• Across Realtime, Vernor Vinge
• Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Death on the Installment Plan, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Castle to Castle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
• Treblinka, Jean-Francois Steiner

Nonfiction:

• Against the Grain, James C. Scott
• The True Believer, Eric Hoffer
• Technological Slavery, Ted Kaczynski
• Anti-Tech Revolution, Ted Kaczynski
• A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright
• Lifespan, David Sinclair
• SCUM Manifesto, Valerie Solanas
• The Murder of Professor Schlick; The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, David Edmonds
• Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer
• “The Good Old Days”; The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, Ernst Klee et al
• On Disobedience, Erich Fromm
• Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram
• Into That Darkness, Gitta Sereny

In-progress:

• Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, Henry Allison
• The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant
• The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul
• The Civilization of the Middle Ages, Norman Cantor
• Hitler’s Furies; German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Wendy Lower
• White Fragility; Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Robin Diangelo
• Overthrown; America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer
• Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka; The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Yitzhak Arad
• Count Zero, William Gibson

The major themes were:

• Dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction
• Philosophy of technology
• Kant
• Holocaust studies
• Céline

I will likely continue with these themes next year.

January readings 2022

• Spinoza's Religion, Clare Carlisle
• Sounding Out Semantics, R.J. Mott
• Against Elections, David Van Reybrouck

re-reading

Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective, Karl-Otto Apel

New Years reading:



Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin - The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire

Yeah, I suppose Capital & Ideology (T. Piketty) isn't 'suitable reading' at the beach ... :smirk:

Anything's beach reading if you have some shade!

:up: