theory

Dang I'm starring this thread there's already a bunch of good stuff here.

I read a bunch of stuff, I'll list most of the non-fiction as that seems to be what most people care about here, and a few fiction titles at the end. I rank things out of seven, where 4 is the average book I'm likely to select to read and each unit away is like a standard deviation from it, so I'll include the ratings too.

How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century - Erik Olun Wright (2/7, shit sucked)

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney (5/7, good but boring in places)

Climate, Corona and Constant Emergency: War Communism in the 21st Century - Andreas Malm (6/7, very good. The covid stuff ages surprisingly well despite being written in April 2020)

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - Engels (5/7 very good obviously)

Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State - Engels (4/7, pretty dry and outdated but it's worth it for the last chapter)

Capital in the 21st Century - Thomas Piketty (6/7, he's a lib but he's a good one and there's a bunch of good stuff in here is you can get past the obviously frustrating stuff here)

Blood in my Eye - George Jackson (6/7, very cool. Very interesting thinker and many of his thoughts and ponderings still feel vital today)

Climate Change as Class War - Matt Huber (4/7, Matt Huber is annoying and should get the wall but underneath that there is a good argument here)

The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World - Andreas Malm [5/7, there's some great stuff in here but also it's a very specific takedown of specific trends in theory and I'm not sure how useful it is outside of academic disputes (as he himself admits)]

Marx in the Anthropocene - Kohei Saito (2/7, this shit sucks. Western Marxist brained academic shit. His premise is that Marxism is good because actually if you deeply read meaning into individual sentences of Marx's unpublished work you'll learn Marx didn't really believe what we think of as Marxism he believed these other things)

Decolonial Marxism - Walter Rodney (3/7, a little dry, there are like 4 really good essays and a bunch of stuff that's very specific to time and space and felt like a bit of a waste of time for me to read as someone who isn't an academic in those areas)

As for fiction, I'll shout only a couple of titles:

Ministry for the Future - Kim Stanley Robinson (3/7, starts out incredibly strong, first 12 pages are like their own perfect climate horror short story about a wet bulb in Mumbai that kills 20 million people. The first 80-100 pages are really good. The wheels come off as it continues and by the end it's just an old white guy's wet fart)

The Fever - Wallace Shawn (6/7, this is great. One-man show about being a socialist, why you kind of have to be one of the you think you're a compassionate person, and the contradictions of living in the imperial core. Very earnest, he somehow does it without being annoying. You can watch him perform it here, it comes in two 45 min parts

Watership Down - Richard Adams (6/7, this was a banger, totally cozy read. Highly recommended.)

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov (7/7, this shit was wild. I've never read anything like it. My understanding of what kind of book it was continually shifted as I continued reading and it kept metastasizing into something weirder and weirder. Like reading a Rubik's cube.)

As for next year, I'm currently reading The Reconciliation Manifesto by Art Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson and If We Burn by Vincent Bevins. I think I'll try to get Piketty's Capital and Ideology under my belt too. Lathe of Heaven by Leguin, A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick, Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, Less is More by Jason Hickels, Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo and Liberation Day by George Saunders all feel very realistic. And then there are the idealistic titles like Ten Crises by Wen Teijun or Superimperialism, or some Samir Amin or Immanuel Wallerstein. But I'm intimidated by those titles so we'll see haha.