Fiction or Non-Fiction, academic or casual, theory or non-theory, feel free to mention books of any genre and on any topic.
Recently got into Catherine Cookson. Her novels are set in the industrial north east of England from the mid 1800s to mid 1900s, and they’re all about poor working class people struggling to survive while battling the upper classes, dealing with racism and misogyny, trying to avoid the workhouse and similar issues.
Sounds really interesting! Let us know your thoughts as you keep reading
23 of the books have been made into films too. They’re often broadcast on TV.
I’ve been rather enjoying some novels of late. I just finished Sinclair’s Oil! and am in the middle of London’s The Iron Heel. Both are pretty explicitly communist books and have this revolutionary optimism, kind of like a book equivalent to early Eisenstein films. There are these bits of The Iron Heel that could pass as quite trenchant prose of today which is refreshing.
Oil! is fascinating to me because it has so many contradictions. It’s kind of not great–vast swaths of the book are Sinclair reporting everything that happens–yet the first and last chapters display quite incredible captivating prose. The last line invokes oil as some kind of demonic metaphor as a material accelerant of capitalism and really hits because the prior 400 pages of “then this happened.” Everyone learns about him in school but I’m not sure anyone reads him, he’s very explicitly a communist or at least a sympathetic socialist. There’s even random tidbits in the book that sound like parapolitical/acid-marxist stuff of today which is kinda crazy considering how old it is. There was some throwaway bit reflecting on how radio broadcast tech homogenizes thought, which perfectly echos that feeling we (or at least I) have nowadays that society is sort of trapped by phones–how can we possibly change things when peoples thoughts are suggested through the capitalist controlled broadcast technologies…
Even crazier is apparently he later wrote these Lanny Budd novels which from wikipedia hit all the parapolitical conspiracies, but unfortunately I don’t know if I could make it through that much more of his stenographic prose.
Anyone else read any revolutionary novels like this? I feel like there’s more of this before the 1950s when anglosphere intellectuals got turned off of communism by Khrushchev’s secret speech.
Oil! last paragraph:
“You can see those graves, with a picket fence about them, and no derrick for a hundred feet or more. Some day all those unlovely derricks will be gone, and so will the picket fence and the graves. There will be other girls with bare brown legs running over those hills, and they may grow up to be happier women, if men can find some way to chain the black and cruel demon which killed Ruth Watkins and her brother—yes, and Dad also: an evil Power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor.”
If only the entire book had prose the quality of the last chapter! I think my dream author would be Dickens if he were a communist in the early 20th-century… oh well…
I’m interested in learning more about these Einstein films. Can you share an example or two?
The early films of Sergei Eisenstein that propagandize communism and the Russian revolution. Battleship Potemkin, Strike, and October are the three that I have in mind (and have actually watched). Strike is the weakest, but has some more intimate and personal tones as well as some excellent naturalistic shots of daily life at the time. Battleship Potemkin is the most famous and retells the mutiny of the titular battleship during the 1905 uprising. October is really excellent and probably the height of Eisenstein synthesizing high-art film-making with a revolutionary purpose, but I think it may have been censored due too being to abstract for the purpose of the film that he was asked to make. (Not sure if censored is the right word, sometimes western resources apply the word very liberally.)
All these films are available without copyright, though the best viewing experience is to track down a DVD (check the library!) as these predate synchronized scores. A physical reissue of a public domain film from the early silent era often budgets in producing a decent score, which is expressly not PD. Some versions available on the internet have poor-quality scores or even AI generated audio.
Oh awkward, I misread and thought you were talking about Albert Einstein since I knew he was a socialist. lol
I read this paper about the food, disease, and death situation in the DPRK. It was interesting, but I wonder if there’s an updated version somewhere, especially since the recent economic boom they have been going through.
I’ve been reading Politically Unconscious: The Psychic Aftermath of the Sudanese Revolution — Mohamed Khougali. He was a psychologist in Sudan and a revolutionary and it has a really strong “Wretched of the Earth” vibe to it.
He’s got some bangers like: “It is not religion that is the “opiate of the masses,” it is the retirement pension.”
I can agree with this.
Most activitists in the United States are in or around some church and church leaders like the ones near me do help or give a platform to, say, anti-war dissidents.
I don’t agree with the retirement pension thing imho
We have been dealing with neoliberalism since the 70s and, you know, in a world where retirement is but a dream in a lot of countries, it hasn’t really done anything.
It doesn’t produce a revolution or revolutionary situation.
The problem is that we keep having “breaks” in the momentum (1920s Red Scare, Second Red Scare, the 1990s/2000s)
Hard to sustain movements and build them up if you keep having to rebuild them from scratch again.
I will read your book though.
I am interested in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and may want to get my Master’s in it in Europe.
I started Vicious by VE Schwab until it got into unwarned content warning territory. So I sped through Legends and Lattes, a much cozier read. Although I don’t know if I enjoyed it as much as I could have, I’ve been struggling with my mental space lately.
Oh, I should read Legends and Lattes
Honestly, I may not read The First Law trilogy at all.
Grimdark is okay every now and then but I can just play some Warhammer 40,000 game like Rogue Trader or something.
I loved my second ever read through of A Song of Ice and Fire (2024 to (2025)
But it being better than anything that HBO has produced in their GOT version of events just… isn’t saying much.
Westeros.org Forums is literally ruled by transphobes, the fifth book (once my favorite book in the series) literally has transphobia near the end (including SA in one of the Tyrion characters before he gets captured by Jorah), Penny gets slapped for essentially no reason, the fanbase is always downplaying or doing apologia for incest and/or pedophilia (looking at you, Renly Epstein fans (err, I mean, Renly Baratheon fans)), the ASOIAF content on YouTube is abysmal and it has basically just circled around… Fuck, what’s his name? The person that came up with the “Dornish conspiracy” theory? Otherwise, it’s basically conspiracy (fan) theory nonsense that has been built up over time.
Also:
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almost all the main POV characters barring maybe one (Davos ig or was idk) are from noble houses (inb4 “commoners aren’t important” arguments incoming or somesuch)
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Best Autistic Rep™ in fantasy (aka The Stan with the Plan aka the Mannis aka
the Trannisaka Stannis Baratheon) will probably do something dum-dum and basically die horribly and I really don’t want to wait till 2031 or 2036 to read that so I am not really going to wait in line for that lol (honestly, I don’t even care “whether he does or doesn’t” flambet Shireen to resurrect Jon Snow or something silly, I don’t care if she’s the Night’s King at the end, etc. just give her estradiol and disappear him somewhere. Give Daenerys some t, he needs it); honestly, I should probably just read the Wikipedia or Fandom wiki of it and just move on, idk -
Jon Snow = useless know-nothing who is only really important due to being Rhaegar’s son
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the Orientalism (don’t get me started)
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the racist stereotypes (they’re somewhat separate in my mind since they encompass more than just what’s in Essos)
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the ableist stereotypes (Bron is a sex pest smdh should have never married Llolyd yeesh)
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bad audiobooks in general ngl
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no leprosy (common Gurm, what medieval setting is this?!)
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no guilds (no, pyromancers don’t count, you know what I mean)
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boring shit happening in King’s Landing all the time (to be fair, more pronounced in the TV shows)
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Super Arya (honestly, it’s her fans I don’t like the most)
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sexist portrayals of women but otherwise the author gets away with it because "GRRM cares about the characters first and foremost and the women are flawed and tragic at the end of the day, same as the men, and so it’s fine if he writes Cersei as a Disney villain or whateve"r)
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saneism (I don’t even care if it’s essentially from the 1990s, it’s time to cut it out)
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pop feminism for bourgeois nobles, ngl
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anti-war message in Book 4 but otherwise promotes war or even other forms of war as a solution (economic, social, psychological, etc.)
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anti-femininity (honestly, I feel like Asha and some of what shes says is a good example of this)
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Also, what’s with Victarion Greyjoy dead-ass thinking that Asha was proposing to marry him and have babies with him (keep in mind that Asha and Victarion are literally uncle and niece, just saying). Yeesh, GRRM, I know that incest happens in this setting, and maybe Victorian is not the brightest, but…
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Eunuchization against males and every other gender is bad and a serious issue in the real world, mmkay (well, tbf, this is really a dig at the TV shows, it’s not really played for laughs during Theon Greyjoy’s story arc in Book 5)
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Book 4 and Book 5 is basically the “time-skip” and, honestly, I’m fine that GRRM didn’t do the time-skip or at least didn’t do it for five years because some of it doesn’t make sense. But, in a way, the series was always supposed to three trilogies (well, there was the treatment that GRRM gave to that publisher, but aside from that…) Otherwise, there was the supposed to be the first trilogy (War of the Five Kings), second trilogy (Daenerys invades Westeros stuff), and then the third trilogy (Long Night or whatever). But also: Daenerys’s chapters in Meereen was literally supposed to be just one or two chapters originally and then he turned it into a whole 'nother arc replete with mustachiod twirling villians and it’s sooooooooooooo boring, dawg…
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Dorkstar (he is of the Night)
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Daario (oh god, if he does the stupid “aunt and nephew” Jon/Dany relationship, I think Daario will either die before that happens, die while it’s happening (oof) and essentially give Daenerys his blessing to “find love where you… find it or whatever”, OR maybe he’ll be turn bad for no good reason (I honestly don’t think that he’s secretly Euron but whatever)
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Brown Ben Plumm (…idk, I just like this person)
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The Hound (should’ve stayed dead, literally killed some kid, I don’t care if he’s a gravedigger now, wtf)
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Marwyn (he’s mysterious and will pull some bullshit out of his ass or know some shit or reveal some shit or maybe do something with the candles but, dawg, I am so tired of characters just being introduced and then disappearing off into the blue)
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Please no “repetition” of phrases writing technique. It gets soooo bad by Book 4 (“wherever removed go”). I don’t even care what eventual scene or “punchline” or nonsense it’s leading up to.
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Look, I’m just going to say it here: the women in this series get a bad wrap from the fans… And the writer, holy shit. Cersei is just as two-dimensional as she appears once you read her POV chapters, Daenerys literaly abuses one of her slaves for no reason even up to Book 5, licentious women like Aemy Frey or whatever suck because they sleep around and that’s bad, all the prostitute characters (e.g. Shae) seems to have a high death count in general, Llolys just gets raped but isn’t treated sympathetically and is treated as dumb so I don’t know what that’s about, Catelyn is basically manipulated by Littlefinger and various others (though gets blamed by fans for “starting the war” even though it’s technically Littlefinger and various others doing that in this case) and, honestly, when Catelyn keeps being portrayed as being suggestible or manipulatible, you’re going to have fans that see her as otherwise useless or annoying or even get resentful about her (latching onto her neglect of what’s essentially her foster child Jon Snow, which is fair, but goddamn, can we talk about Jaime Lannister…)
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To be fair, I really don’t know what Jaime is going to do in Book 6. Most likely we’ll get Book 6 but Book 7 won’t be published during GRRM’s lifetime is what I’m guessing. Either way, I’m just going to say it, he really… hasn’t gone through Theon levels of sufferance or self-reflection or realization. Idk. His arc is fine but I have a feeling that Jaime is just going to coast at this point and sidestep any real growth that he did in Book 3, but eh, whatever, we’ll see.
In conclusion: Oh, Robert (Head)Strong Baratheon, just shoot lasers at everyone in this series and make it end! Make it stop! Maybe then you can take the Brotherhood Without Banners (literally started to “serve the King” (they mean Robert, that’s literally what they say at one point)) and go start a mercenary company and start your own kingdom. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind spinoffs set after the events of ASOIAF but eh whatever, those will disappoint too. Disclaimer: Also, my “Robert Strong is Robert Baratheon” theory is a personal fan theory of mine and even I really don’t believe it, though I never really tell people because I don’t like adding my fan theory to all the other “theory slop” that I see out there, at least not in Internet spaces that are centered around ASOIAF, so yeah, I’m sure some other bloke mentioned it somewhere in some online community but I don’t care at this point.
I need good fiction shit to read ngl
I wouldn’t mind fantasy, scifi, weird, etc. fiction suggestions to start with
Also, I think the YouTuber is Preston Jacobs or something
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Reading Theses on Feuerbach.
Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
This quote goes hard no matter how many times I have read it.
it’s a classic for a reason!
One of my favorite quotes of all time and one i frequently cite.
I’m slowly making my way through Roland Boer’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners” and I’m about halfway through. To me it’s the same feeling as when I read State and Revolution for the first time; when I first read S&R as a little radlib and I learned about how the working class needs to use the tools of the state to suppress the bourgeoisie, or even the basics of class conflict, it just clicked as something so practical and obvious. Likewise when I learn about Mao’s developments on primary and secondary contradictions, or the broader Chinese Marxist developments on the purpose of market institutional forms, it just seems so obvious.
maozedoll is a good username
Some Marxist (and honestly some political, sociological, psychological, etc.) books are just “read once and you’re done and it doesn’t even leave any impression.”
But other books really affect you.
The euphoria I get each of those experiences is a bit indescribable.
It isn’t even that the first group does nothing, but rather it lays the foundation, the slow accumulation of a quantity until it reaches a point where a transformation in quality occurs, that leap in awareness and understanding, that couldn’t have happened without a foundation to stand on when making it. You need decades where (seemingly) “nothing” happens in order to reach weeks where “decades” happen, so to speak.
Edit: that said, there are definitely books that really hit the Marx (badum tiss), and liberal works which use many words to say very little as they are hiding just how little they have to say.
Oh this is true
In my opinion:
Nothing is a waste anymore.
Frankly, just this realization alone has cured my anhedonia.
After reading Wage Labor and Capital two weeks ago, my study group and I just finished Value, Price, and Profit. It was really good and I felt that it was an easier read than Wage Labor and Capital. That said, for modern audiences, I feel like the first 6 chapters could have been skipped and replaced with a paragraph summarizing Marx’s argument against Weston.
Reading these two texts together while sitting in the breakroom of my job gave me a deep feeling of dread as I listened to the ways in which my coworkers conversationally support our own exploitation and recontextualized how I view the social dynamics of my workplace. I equate that feeling with a fish becoming aware of the water their swimming in. I often get that feeling after finishing a political book, but these two texts really drove that feeling within me and it has prominently stuck with me since.
My study group will be taking a break from reading and will begin focusing on creating slideshows for each book we’ve read for our ML class we’re making. While working on that, I think I’m going to read two books in the meantime. I’m going to pick up where I left off with Settlers, but that text is very long so I might try to also read Roland Beor’s ‘Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: A Concise Guide’.
I’m reading a contribution to the critique of political economy, after I’ll read ludwig feueurbach and the end of classical german philosy, I couldn’t sleep a wink last night so I decided to just get up instead, if I can’t sleep I might as well read.
Average Tankie behavior.
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y
Started Capital vol III
Do Capital vol. IV
There’s a forth?!
Edit: found it on marxists.org, here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/epub/capital-v4.epub
Yes, but the Soviet Union literally took Marx’s notes and explained them much better and made them much more accurate than Kautsky did.
They have their own edition but the only one people know about is Kautsky’s version.
Looking in the epub from marxists.org, looks like it is the Soviet Union version, even talks about Kautsky omitting and distorting in the preface
bueno
The one by kautsky?
The one that Kautsky bastardized so the Soviet Union had to do their own more accurate version, yes
Reading both Nkrumah’s Neocolonialism and now Anna Louise Strong’s This Soviet World in parallel, the latter being for Hexbear’s new reading group on c/Soviet.
This Soviet World is great, I also love The Stalin Era.
Agreed!
Here’s my conclusions on How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler: while reading any expository text, you should think about three things:
- What is the purpose of the text?[1]
- What is the relationship between the text and its context from the perspective of the text?
- What is the relationship between the text and its context from the perspective of the context?
The “text” can be an entire book, a paragraph, a sentence, or a single word. The “context” is the wider context in which the text is inserted (paragraph in a chapter, chapter in a book etc) and it also includes the reader, the writer, the wider body of texts in history, and – most importantly – the material world.
How to Read a Book is a guide on the steps the reader must do in order to transform a context into a text.
(I don’t want to clutter this thread, so this is the rest of my thoughts)
tap to read some rambling
So, whenever you ask yourself “is this text true?” you are actually asking “does material reality agree with this text?” which is a relationship; whenever you ask “is this text useful for me?” you are asking for a relationship between text and reader (which is you).
The “context” can also be the larger part of the document in which the text is inserted. For example, if the text is a single sentence, then the context can be a paragraph; If it’s a paragraph, then the context can be a chapter; If a book, then it’s the wider author’s literature, or the wider discipline (eg: The Capital as part of the wider Marxist body of text); and so on.
I believe that the aforementioned steps are the same process that Mao Zedong describes in On Contradiction but in more narrow terms[2]. See this paragraph where Mao describes how one should study the world:
Since the particular is united with the universal and since the universality as well as the particularity of contradiction is inherent in everything, universality residing in particularity, we should, when studying an object, try
- to discover both the particular and the universal and their interconnection,
- to discover both particularity and universality and also their interconnection within the object itself, and
- to discover the interconnections of this object with the many objects outside it.
Note that “object” can be an idea, a society, a physical object, or a subject of a book.
So, the process of Inspectional Reading (which is a systematic skimming a book) is the process of discovering the context (which is the book), Analytical Reading is the process of transforming this context into the text, and Synoptical Reading is the process of widening the context to include other books (thereby the book becomes a text within a context).
It’s a half-cooked idea on my mind right now but I really think this is fascinating. (also, I dunno if I should’ve posted here or on c/theory)
So, the process of Inspectional Reading (which is a systematic skimming a book) is the process of discovering the context (which is the book), Analytical Reading is the process of transforming this context into the text, and Synoptical Reading is the process of widening the context to include other books (thereby the book becomes a text within a context).
can you expand on this for me? i understand what you mean by these in theory given the previous context (wow, how relevant), but what exactly do these mean in practice? are they recommended to be done in order?
furthermore, do you think the essential ideas contained within this text that you’ve read are true enough (i.e. in alignment with reality, wow again how relevant) that you would recommend it for those wishing to learn how to study? do you think the information is or will be valuable to you?
So, the book tells us that there exists 4 levels of reading – Elementary, Inspectional, Analytic, and Synoptical --, each building on each other. Think of a tower. Here’s an explanation:
- Elementary: reading in it’s most basic terms. If you can read this, you are on this level. If you don’t master this level, when for example you read something in a language you can’t understand, you won’t be able to read a book systematically
- Inspectional: it’s skimming the book to understand what the book is about, how it’s organized. Here your focus is on the form and purpose of a book. Think how you can instantly know if you are reading a recipe vs a manual, even though both are “instructional”. Not because of the content, but because of the title, the headings, etc. In short, it’s doing the best reading possible in a limited amount of time.
- Analytical: it’s actually reading the book well. How do you build a good mental model to understand the content of the book?
- Synoptical: it’s making a synthesis of the content of several books with your own judgement and previous knowledge. As an analogy, it’s like each book became a paragraph in an article. You are the author here.
The book is not a philosophical work. It’s very practical. Each one of those levels has its own practical concrete techniques on how to perform them well.
Also, it has tips on specific types of books like math ones, novels, philosophical works etc.
I liked this book because it helped me see texts differently. Like, for example, think about why authors do not give you an outline of their arguments. Why is prose so important even in technical works? Why did Lenin have to spend so much time talking about other people’s ideas and why was that so important?
I think it’s a good book. Adler 100% was not a Communist (he spends a lot of the chapter on Elementary Reading talking about the US in positive terms. I skipped it) but I think his advice was very dialectical in my opinion.
I hope this helps. Did I understand your question?
Thank you comrade, reading your thoughts on this book was very interesting
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I don’t think what I wrote was very useful for someone that hasn’t read the book.
For someone that hasn’t read it, I think it’s a really good book. That’s it. It’s easy to read and it has personally helped me on how to absorb larger texts. It’s like a guide on how to build a scaffold to read theory, I think. Adler even gives you a checklist of what you should do, like “Rule 1 - read the title, Rule 2 - read the first lines of each chapter etc.”.
It’s about 300 pages long but I think the chapters on Inspectional and Analytical reading are enough for like 99% of Communist theory and I think you can read them in an afternoon.
For how true it is, it was useful for me, I suppose. I thought about how it relates to working memory and stuff but honestly it’s not relevant. It’s just a checklist with explanations. If it doesn’t work for you, I still think that you can adapt the advice for you.
In short, what I wrote was me looking at a manual on how to read, looking at communist theory and thinking “hmm similar.”
Another comrade on hexbear did a way better job than me of telling what this book is about
Do you know any books or articles on biological evolution?
I wanted to remember this subject this week.
What for? School test?
Teaching myself. It doesn’t need to be a long text
I am interested in biology too now
especially the bio-social aspect that they’re discovering more of
