| TITLE | ISBN | AUTHOR | READ |
|---|---|---|---|
| RATING | COMMENT | ||
| The Communist Manifesto | 978-0717802418 | Marx & Engel | Many |
| Great | What is there to say? Class struggle is real, we are at war as we slide into neo-feudalism. Workers break your chains! | ||
| Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism | 978-0717800988 | Lenin | Many |
| Great | The power of monopoly is immense. We've become trapped in a prison of our own making; enclosure is now the rule rather than the exception. | ||
| The Origin of Capitalism | 9781859843925 | Wood | 2x |
| Great | A really brilliant book. Capitalism is not the natural state of humanity. | ||
| The Iliad | N/A | Homer | 1x |
| Great | I especially enjoyed the hyper-specific descriptions of warriors on the battlefield getting their turn to be killed or do the killing. | ||
| Red Petrograd | 9780511562952 | SA Smith | 1x |
| Great | Watching a revolution form from the disaffected workers is better than drugs. | ||
| Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants | 9780813507255 | Clark | 1x |
| Great | 'Lit' my imagination up in regards to liquid propellants; read this in Hong Kong. | ||
| Parable of the Sower | 9780446675505 | Butler | 1x |
| Great | One of the best fiction books ever written. Pinpoints and then extracts society's future issues and puts it in this book. I'm surprised she didn't have a time machine or a crystal ball when she wrote this. The chaos of the future is clear to see for anyone with a brain to think. | ||
| Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder | N/A | Lenin | 1x |
| Great | Reading Lenin tear apart the most foolish of the left’s most self-defeating group does not get tiring. | ||
| The Trial | 9780805210408 | Kafka | Many |
| Great | The confusion, the insanity, the absence of timely communication, the benign terror! I simply love the way this book makes me feel. It’s a maze of bureaucracy, a 1920s disintegration of a man, an annihilation so impersonal and so rote and quiet that they’ve almost gone back in time to erase him from ever existing. For some reason reading his confusion and anguish is calming, because I know the ending. The story structure feels a bit Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness, where every chapter he loses more options and has no way out, a claustrophobic ever-narrowing corridor! | ||
| The State and Revolution | N/A | Lenin | 1x |
| Great | I seemed to enjoy this but it was so long ago I need to re-read it. | ||
| Fahrenheit 451 | 9780007491568 | Bradbury | 2x |
| Great | Dystopian classic, I remember from every moment onward after reading this book I thought of it when I saw books being burned. I became a staunch anti-book-burner. I’m funny. | ||
| Brave New World | 9780060929879 | Huxley | 1x |
| Great | The debauchery and unrestrained nature of this book made me feel oddly sick. Incredible dystopia. | ||
| 1984 | 978-045152493 | Orwell | 1x |
| Great | Ever since TikTok and the proliferation of replacing words with algorithm-safe equivalents I think of this book. Altering language to fit the censors the way so many young folk do today is equivalent to a slow strangulation of the English language. Rape is not grape, suicide is not self-delete or unalive or whatever insipid phrase that’s being used now. Between that and how today we are always under observation, this book gets more relevant each passing month, depressingly. | ||
| A Briefer History of Time | 9780553804362 | Hawking | 1x |
| Great | Space is a beautiful but deadly place. Read a long time ago but the beauty of space stuck with me. | ||
| At the Mountains of Madness | 9780812974416 | Lovecraft | Many |
| Great | This book is the reason for my obsession with the Transantarctic mountains; Lovecraft's nightmare at its finest. | ||
| Red Mars | 9780553560732 | Robinson | 1x |
| Great | I looked up hard science fiction books a lifetime ago, and I found this series. Looking back on it I realised the libertarian nature of the entire thing, the fruitless exercise of sending the brightest and best alone, modifying them to be even better and to live longer, and for what? While the workers on Earth choked to death and bled and suffered? There is no escaping the tendrils of capitalism. After reading it it truly felt like I took the expedition to Mars with the team; what a fun and engrossing series. | ||
| Green Mars | 9780553572391 | Robinson | 1x |
| Great | Somehow just as good as the above. This is where the consequences arrive in the form of ‘immigrants’/workers to Mars and all the bad (or good depending on your perspective) actors that that entails if I remember this book correctly after 12 years lol. The struggle between wanting the familiar while everything changes around you is a tale as old as time. | ||
| Dune | 9780340839935 | Herbert | 1x |
| Great | Science fiction classic, I do enjoy the Islamic influences in the book – and now that the new movies have come out I’m pretty upset they didn’t mention jihad once, it’s literally integral to the book! The mention of a religious JIHAD specifically, don’t wuss out guys… | ||
| Economic Writings I | 9781781687659 | Luxemburg | 1x |
| Great | An intellectual giant who's life was cut far far too short. If we could have 100 Rosa Luxemburgs teaching the masses every day for ten years our current situation would be much better off. | ||
| On China | 9781594202711 | Kissinger | 2x |
| Great | What an astute analysis of China. This book gave me one of the broadest, best views on what exactly China is. For Kissinger...a unique evil can only be made under the right conditions. His analysis of China is second-to-none. | ||
| Meditations | 9780140449334 | Aurelius | 2x |
| Great | Like any usual young teen I devoured this book, sat in my lounge chair in an apartment complex in the sun and tried grafting parts of this book onto my already existing personality, successfully, and unsuccessfully. | ||
| The Forever War | 9780060510862 | Haldeman | Many |
| Great | My favourite scifi book. Bar none. Every time Marley – was his name Marley? – goes away and comes back to a changed world it tickled me, it felt like mirrored my own life and I really loved that. The alienation, even from long-standing friends, family, how do you explain the things you’ve seen, how do you convey that you’re just not the same? I know it sounds almost like a tour-of-duty but if you go on an extreme enough trip it can become ‘traumatic’ in a way, you have to deal with the death of your pre-existing notions about the world and that’s not easily let go of. | ||
| Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic | 9781400078974 | Holland | 1x |
| Great | A really thrilling book, Rome is on the minds of so many, even to this day. Cassius and Cicero seemed so intriguing, ruthless and powerful, I should really read more about them two specifically. | ||
| The Search for Modern China | 9780393307801 | Spence | 1x |
| Great | One of the best overviews on modern Chinese history ever, Ming to the recent past. I found this book looking at what UC Berkeley was teaching their students. Sun Yat-sen was a genius of diplomacy, how different the world would be if his life wasn't cut short. | ||
| Rendezvous with Rama | 9781857231588 | Clarke | 2x |
| Great | Classic science fiction – I could feel like I was there reading the news about the oblong rock-ship-thing. Taking the trip up to it, unlocking its doors finally and seeing the inside of this truly alien object. My imagination was alight with possibility. | ||
| All the Shah's Men | 9780471678786 | Kinzer | 1x |
| Great | What the British and the Americans did to Iran is horrific but not uncommon due to imperialism. Mosaddegh was incredible, his tenure cut far FAR too short. It makes me upset and sad he did not get to make Iran in his vision. | ||
| Manufacturing Consent | 9780375714498 | Herman & Chomsky | 1x |
| Great | Go read the Washington Post or the New York Times and tell me they’re not covering for capital. Not to mention complete rags like the New York Post or whatever garbage. Go read the cowardly media apparatus staffed by the most yellow-bellied wannabe upper crust dogs and witness them bend into pretzels to justify whatever neolib opinion they’ve cowed themselves into believing, the curs. Watch them twist and turn to make Israel look saintly, look as they perform pirouettes, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. Truly pathetic. They cover for the bourgeoisie the vast majority of time because their minds are weak, and they’re either already bourgeois themselves or think if they ingratiate themselves enough with their ‘articles’ they’ll be on the ‘right side’. And for these feckless adult children who wallow in press-room daycare, your parents don’t love you. Your parents make up medical issues so you can take the SATs at home, you’re being lulled into complacency! Donating six figures to some ivy-league, legacy admission, getting in contact with friends in the newsroom to get you your first internship is not going to make you special! Do you know what will make you special? Betraying your class, and helping the proletariat cause in your area today. | ||
| Berserk | 9781593070205 | Miura | N/A |
| Great | A very dangerous and dark world made alive with vivid imagery and interesting characters; the Golden Age Arc is one of the best examples of creative storytelling in the medium. | ||
| The End of Alchemy | 9780393247022 | King | 1x |
| Great | A great overview of the history of money and banking. I’ve recommended this book to so many people, it’s really an accessible overview even for those not terribly interested in its stated topics. | ||
| A Brief History of Neoliberalism | 9780199283279 | Harvey | 1x |
| Great | Neoliberalism is a cancer on society and this book shows how this malodorous force has been thrust on us today. | ||
| Napoleon in Egypt | 9780553806786 | Strathern | 1x |
| Great | A thrilling book on Napoleon's invasion, the Battle of the Nile was extremely vivid; I could feel the mood of the world at that time it felt like. | ||
| Human Acts | 9781101906729 | Kang | 1x |
| Great | What a unique book, hard to describe but the writing is very special. When I saw that she won a Pulitzer (was that the prize?) I was very proud for some reason. I felt like I was in Gwangju and was killed myself, this book is great. | ||
| Grant | 9781594204876 | Chernow | 1x |
| Great | A massive tome on an unexpectedly interesting president in US history. Who would’ve thought a quiet boy who hated school would turn out to be such a military genius? And not only a genius but a kind person to boot, that kindness being the most admirable quality about him, because to be great is special but to be kind is a truly rare thing, but to be both? Very improbable. I would've liked to have known him personally. I also liked how Grant treated his wife, he seemed like a real gentleman. I’m glad they had such a big parade in New York for him at the end of the war, he deserved it along with the rest of the veterans who fought against that traitorous Confederate horde. Sherman should’ve went all the way. | ||
| Lenin | N/A | Lukes | 1x |
| Great | Great overview on the politics of one of the most heroic men of the 20th century. | ||
| The Holocaust Industry | 9781804297216 | Finklestein | 1x |
| Great | The first thing I thought was Finklestein is DEFINITELY banned from Israel! It boggles the mind how duplicitous Zionists can be, and how they can be so conniving towards holocaust victims. Endless disgust for those who tread on Judaic values for personal gain in the name of Zionism while holding Judaism as a shield against criticism. This book also repudiates the majority of the anti-Switzerland propaganda (which is aimed at the Swiss bankers but the rest of the country gets rolled up in the hubbub too) which is a nice change of pace from the random lies people like to spew about the place – like Finklestein states, who thinks Swiss bankers need defending, who wants to cover for them when they have more money than god? But by golly Zionists make it possible. | ||
| 2001 A Space Odyssey | 9780451457998 | Clarke | 1x |
| Great | Watch the movie and it is identical to this book – travel through space always interest me, it's truly a deadlier sea. | ||
| Bitter harvest | 9781903402054 | Ian Smith | 1x |
| Great | No matter what you think of Rhodesia, as low as you may think of it, it is positioned in a unique spot in history and to hear its short existence from the horse’s mouth so to speak is invaluable. And even in his vaguely stilted racially standoffish thoughts Ian Smith is surprisingly respectful towards the black population of his former country...albeit overly patriarchal. If this book was widely read I’m sure it would cause quite a bit of confusion as to how Rhodesia managed to collapse so quickly when WORSE states such as Israel stand tall. Food for thought indeed… | ||
| Violent Entrepreneurs | 9780801487781 | Volkov | 1x |
| Great | The bad old 90’s in Russia, if someone buzzes you with a jet fighter during a mafia meet you’ve already lost your negotiating position! | ||
| FedAccounts Digital Dollars | N/A | Ricks, Crawford, Menand | 1x |
| Great | Read this paper on release in 2020; really brilliant stuff. It’s been quite a while since I’ve read the whole paper but I felt pretty illuminated afterwards. The idea of a digital currency seems like it can be useful with the right precautions in place...which unfortunately doesn’t give me high hopes for the United States. One thing I really really loved though was the idea of a federal(?) bank account, every citizen having the option to have a free automatic bank account to park their liquidity. I think that would help immensely with the destitute and make things more efficient in a true sense of the word -- not in the ‘we get to pay poor people less benefits’ way like Cameron in the UK back in 2011 and his ‘Welfare Reform’ scam where now the working poor in the UK are beyond shafted. Tangent aside it’s a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the future and in money. | ||
| The Unknown Cultural Revolution | 9781583671801 | Dongping | 1x |
| Good | A book edging on great because of its honest assessment of the Cultural Revolution. The uplifting of the peasantry by Mao with the Cultural Revolution is something to be deeply admired even at the temporary expense of the comfort of some proletariat elements of 70s Chinese society. To read about corrupt officials getting their just desserts was very satisfying, and it is truly a shame that Deng Xiaoping felt the need to reverse the gains to solidify his leadership position. One can only hope a second cultural revolution has more permanent gains. I also wish this book was longer and given a second researcher to give a deeper insight into how those corrupt former landlords and maleficent village clans planned their vengeance...just for a good reference. | ||
| Selous Scouts | N/A | Baxter | 1x |
| Good | The Selous Scouts were a complicated organisation, but their no-rules nearly paramilitary actions are deserving of study and this book doesn’t idolise them unnecessarily | ||
| Deng Xiaoping’s Long War | 9781469642345 | Zhang | 1x |
| Good | Written as best as the author could muster; this book delved into a forgotten war, a mistaken adventure, two brothers against each other. I hope this is the kind of mistake -- or inconvenient political move -- that is only made exactly once by the party and its leadership. | ||
| The Comintern | 9781931859523 | Hallas | 1x |
| Good | Detailed account on the third international. Pretty specific slice of history but good to understand the politics and organisation of revolution. | ||
| Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents | 9781787383067 | Kaszeta | 1x |
| Good | Nerve agents got a big boost in interest from me when Kim Jong Eun's brother was assassinated. Saw this book on Twitter and gave it a go. | ||
| Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs | 9780896086111 | Chomsky | 1x |
| Good | What is a rogue state? Obviously any country that goes against the United States! Duh! (This is sarcasm) | ||
| The Lessons of October | N/A | Trotsky | 1x |
| Good | Needs to be re-read. | ||
| Animal Farm | 9780452284241 | Orwell | 1x |
| Good | The mental picture of animals doing politics is very pleasant, beyond that Orwell’s complicated relationship with being an anti-fascist AND somehow an anti-communist makes a showing here, his anarchist-leftish-ness. | ||
| Afgansty | 9781846680540 | Braithwaite | 1x |
| Good | Knew next to nothing about the Soviet-Afghan war, this book enlightened me. Was a straight standard Western book about war that somehow included no real talk on politics from what I remember. Many authors aren’t really equipped to analyse such things but the book was good nonetheless! Enjoyed the raid on the president/warlord's compound(?). | ||
| The Art of War | N/A | Sun Tzu | 1x |
| Good | A Chinese classic, many good aphorisms. It all seems so simple, but we had to start somewhere in strategy, we stand on the shoulders of giants. | ||
| Alas Babylon | 9780060741877 | Pat Frank | 1x |
| Good | I don't think I've read many books that felt the way this particular novel felt. The worst event could take place in the 1950s and as long as you were in the right social class racially and economically the optimism present in the culture could power an entire civilisation; nuclear holocausts were just things you had to go through with gumption and a smile on your face. | ||
| World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War | 9780307346605 | Brooks | 2x |
| Good | Do you know how fun it must’ve been to write this book? This was the height of zombie-mania in the media back then. Man did people love zombies, slow but inexorable. Now zombies are walkers or infected and they’re fast as hell, they’re not death, they’re malcontents of society! Oh how culture changes. | ||
| A People's Tragedy | 9780140243642 | Figes | 1x |
| Good | Detailed account of the Russian Revolution – although I do not remember if it was biased against Bolshevism. I picked this one up at a specific time in my life and after reading the Communist Manifesto I wanted to know more about the events leading up to the October Revolution as well as the revolution itself. Lo-and-behold ‘A People’s Tragedy’. For whatever reason, and maybe it’s because it’s been over a decade, I do not remember this book delving in the detail I wanted into anything communistic or Bolshevik, I do remember this author mentioning Kerensky a lot (which makes sense, transitional govt) among other things, along with the Tsar’s idiocy – which to be frank this author wrote about him a little sympathetically, but again I’m not sure – but it felt like it tried NOT focusing on the Bolsheviks; this very well may be explained by my complete lack of knowledge back then. Who knows! It was a long book. | ||
| The Death and Life of Great American Cities | 9780375508738 | Jacobs | 1x |
| Good | There is a great importance to this book, but maybe I wasn't fully equipped to understand it at the time of reading. Need to reread. | ||
| Mass Effect Revelation | 9780345498168 | Karpyshyn | 2.5x |
| Good | It’s common to have a book come out, have it gain popularity and then watch the movie and compare the two. It’s very rare to have a book, a prequel about a GAME that is about to come out and then have it enhance the experience. There's a beach in Hawaii you can find me happily reading this on in 2007. This made the release of Mass Effect that much sweeter, and it so engrossed me as a young teen that I read it nearly thrice on that trip! | ||
| The Last Question | 9781884214493 | Asimov | 1x |
| Good | Really interesting short story; everything changes while some things stay the same. | ||
| The End of Eternity | 9780765319180 | Asimov | 1x |
| Good | Classic scifi book, but, Issac Asimov has clearly never interacted with a woman before, at least not normally… | ||
| Annihilation | 9780374104092 | Vandermeer | 1x |
| Good | Dream in book form. This felt like if you visited a place that was made out of poetry, if that makes any sense. Since I read this before the movie was released I can enjoy the book and movie as two separate entities. Although as time has gone on the visual language of the movie overrides the book, and it’s so strong that the book, despite being good, feels like a prototype for the movie. The ideas really lend itself well to a visual medium. | ||
| White Rage | 9781632864123 | Anderson | 1x |
| Good | Great book to read if you want to learn about race relations in the United States. | ||
| Blood for the Blood God | 9781844166084 | Werner | 1x |
| Good | I really enjoy how this type of Warhammer 40k book ends with every peer dead, having sacrificed themselves, while the main character stands alone in some bizarre dimension consumed by some sort of personality disorder or whatever. I love it. | ||
| Palace of the Plague Lord | 9781844164813 | Werner | 1x |
| Good | See above. | ||
| The Andromeda Strain | 9780060541811 | Crichton | 1x |
| Good | Read this one post-COVID after hearing about it my whole life. Wish it was a bit longer but it was a (good) tense read. Biological weapons and alien organisms? What’s not to like. | ||
| One L | 9780446673785 | Turow | 1x |
| Good | Stressful experience the first year of law school at Harvard is. | ||
| The Martian | 9780804139021 | Weir | 2x |
| Good | I enjoyed the tight constraints the main character (hereon Matt Damon!) had to deal with. His green thumb and science acumen saved him, hooray for intelligence! Saw the echoes of the popularity of this book before release so I picked it up when it came out, when the movie came out I was excited but think the book isn’t really translatable to the screen therefore the movie was inferior to the book. | ||
| To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia | 9781859843666 | Parenti | 1x |
| Good | The Yugoslavian war was brutal and the West’s failures to understand the conflict (as usual) just made everything worse. This feels like a wound that can never be healed, a really jagged and throbbing scar across that part of the world. | ||
| Cambodia, 1975-1982 | 9789747100815 | Vickery | 1x |
| Good | A looking glass inside the truth about the Democratic Kampuchea regime, led by peasant fetishising leadership including the notorious Pol Pot. Unmarxist and delusional as they were, Cambodia was already in the throes of violence and the insistence on throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak by ‘starting over’ completely...why? Yes, let’s destroy industry completely...to then have us rebuild industry but this time ‘correctly’…??? The Cambodian people were failed so so badly; peasant revolutions with the wrong cultural characteristics and unfocused and untrained leadership are highly dangerous, unrestrained chaos. | ||
| The Rhodesian War: A Military History | 9780811707251 | Moorcraft & McLaughlin | 1x |
| Good | Very interesting look into a time and place I know little about aside from Danny Archer. | ||
| One Soldier's War | N/A | Babchenko | 1x |
| Good | The Chechen war, predicated on so many lies and confusing circumstances, is the base for this honest book. I can't think of many things worse than being a Russian soldier. | ||
| Crusade | 9780395710838 | Atkinson | 1x |
| Good | A very clinical and detailed overview of the Persian Gulf War from the U.S. perspective. I felt transported back to 1991. It ignited a renewed interest in that period of time for me. I began to read more about what exactly happened at that time, anything possible. I came across The Fire This Time (an audio documentary) and I was blown away by what I didn’t get to read in this book. I cannot believe what happened at the Amiriyah shelter, the horror the US wrought on the Iraqi people should really never be forgotten. On a bit of a lighter note: Schwarzkopf looks a bit like Norm McDonald oddly enough. | ||
| The Founding | 9781844163694 | Abnett | 1x |
| Good | Something about gathering a team of unique individuals being competent and indulging in brutal combat really strikes my fancy. | ||
| Eisenhorn | 9781844161560 | Abnett | 1x |
| Good | A surprisingly good fiction book set in one of my favourite fictional (thank god) universes: Warhammer 40k. | ||
| Ghostmaker | 9780671784102 | Abnett | 1x |
| Good | Is this in the omnibus? Not even sure. | ||
| Horus Rising | 9781844162949 | Abnett | 1x |
| Good | The story of the Horus Heresy is a science fiction classic at this point, no matter what medium the story is told in. | ||
| Ghost in the Wires | 9780316037709 | Mitnick | 1x |
| Good | My teenage mind enjoyed the bending and breaking of the rules he talked about. I did NOT enjoy innocents being credit card scammed though, I thought it was immoral, I mean if you have the skill to commit crimes of these types with computers and whatnot you must have the wherewithal to target people who either deserve it or won’t feel your criminal ‘sting’ so to speak. There was also a part where he gamed the bus system with his fake(?) tickets or whatever it was to get free bus rides, I thought back to when the the Orange Line was opening for the first time let’s just say I had a lot of interesting ideas…! Thought I read this book in the 2000s but apparently not? | ||
| How China Lends | N/A | Gelpern, Horn et al | 1x |
| Good | Not technically a book but a paper released in March 2021 on the lending practises of the Chinese government to 3rd world borrowers. Really enjoyed it though, it was a sober analysis and didn’t feel too lurid BUT it did make me laugh knowing the history of the World Bank and the West’s own much longer and much more conniving lending practises! Even with knowing that it was still an enjoyable read. | ||
| The Origins of Military Thought | N/A | Gat | 1x |
| Good | Only barely a good book, but maybe because I’m not as well-versed as I’d like to believe on military history. I’m not sure exactly what I got out of this that I feel wasn’t explained better through reading other material, maybe a future me will find more to like about this. | ||
| Of Mice and Men | N/A | Steinbeck | 1x |
| Good | Another middle-school classic. Traumatised us all! | ||
| The Enemy Within | 9781781683422 | Milne | 1/2x |
| Ok | I wanted to like this book, and there was tidbits of decent information in it, but this book is for the reader in 1998. The book has become redundant due to the course of time and the facts that get revealed as Sad Island becomes sadder switching between Tories and Labour as if there’s a difference after Corbyn. Also unfortunately much of it is written in a gossipy way which you can’t even skip around mentally so it’s even more of a slog -- otherwise this book would be good. Also, watching Thatcher unintentionally try and destroy the UK through her Reaganistic actions to destroy labour power is so depressing but useful to see the history of. | ||
| History of South Africa | 9780300189353 | Thompson | 1x |
| Ok | What a long and storied history the tip of Africa has had. I would’ve loved to have seen it pre-colonisation, a harsh land no doubt but beautiful. One thing I really resented about this book was the feeling of normalisation I was getting from the author regarding behaviour of some of the tribes, was South Africa really better with these groups running around in their huts killing and sometimes even eating each other? Wars where they slaughtered each other until there was a ‘balance’ between the groups, seemingly in perpetuity with no advancement ever? Not justifying colonialism in the least but it seemed a little hellish before the Dutch, turned into hell with colonialism until the very tail end of the 80s and then just stayed moderately miserable until now where the country just barely exists. I don’t know. It seems South Africa was never meant to be a country, is it the resource curse, or plain capitalism exacerbating long-standing issues? Even pre-capitalism it seemed shaky, it feels a bit cursed, entropy is in the process of tearing apart, to be returned to the wild. Also, to me it felt like the author had a gun to his neck while writing this book! | ||
| Democracy in Chains | 9781101980965 | MacLean | 1x |
| Ok | I respect the book for outlining Buchanan and the Libertarian project to screw over everyone except twenty bourgeois guys in the name of ‘freedom’. He’s a twat and the rest of his ilk should be fertiliser. Disgusting people. But the book provides no alternative/solution that I can remember other than milquetoast liberal resistance. | ||
| Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine | 9780374277932 | Jisheng | 1x |
| Ok | A harsh time for the Chinese peasantry during these long years. I hope the ones that survived it got to live happier lives in the modern bustling and safe China. And that everyone in their families who died didn’t suffer needlessly. | ||
| The Gulag Archipelago | 9780060007768 | Solzhenitsyn | 1x |
| Ok | I’m not sure I fully believe him with everything but prison sucks and the rapes and the murders in them are so dreadful and happen in a lot of places. What awful places to be, places of incarceration | ||
| Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep | 9780345404473 | Dick | 1x |
| Ok | Didn't really resonate with me. I enjoyed Blade Runner much more for whatever reason. | ||
| The Tcheka | N/A | Popoff | 1x |
| Ok | An absurdly funny quarter-truthful account of the Tcheka, essentially a 1925 long-form article expounding how incredulous that he, the smart and neutral George Popoff could ever be accused of being in league with any enemies of these heathen ‘asiatic’ Bolsheviks. | ||
| Spillover | 9780393346619 | Quammen | 1x |
| Ok | An ok book but devolves significantly in the last quarter(?). Turns into some hypothetical tale of a jungle kid and all this wordcount padding shit. Read this long before SARS-2. | ||
| Command and Control | 9781594202278 | Schlosser | 1x |
| Ok | Made me want to hunt for hidden buried nuclear weapons off the coast of Spain! A fun book on ‘broken arrows’, I found it interesting. Still upset and will forever be ticked that I was promised a movie and it never got green-lit! | ||
| Genome | 9780060894085 | Ridley | 1x |
| Ok | A journey through all the chromosomes. Only marred really by this dipshit's obvious Thatcherism; a true Brexiteer he turned out to be too, what a surprise. | ||
| Chinese Industrial Espionage | 9780415821414 | Hannas & Mulvenon & Puglisi | 1x |
| Ok | Written in an almost paranoid way; odd book written to convince people that China stealing secrets – an action every country does and has forever done and will forever do – is somehow a unique never-before-seen plot against humanity (the West). This book is also written in a way to appeal to people who like to organise tic-tacs in their spare time. | ||
| Tampa | 9780062280541 | Nutting | 1x |
| Ok | Wow, one of the few things I’ve read that actually made me a little nauseous, especially at the beginning. If heaping disgust on the reader was the main objective – which it seemed to be – it succeeded in spades! What’s weird is that the book was actually funny in a few parts, but man what a nasty trip it was. I feel conflicted not giving it a good rating but only a VERY few times it ALMOST felt fetishistic and not in an intentional type of way like Lolita, from what little I’ve read in that book, so I can’t really say it was better than just ok. Maybe I just don’t have enough understanding reading through the perspective of literary female pedophile characters? | ||
| The Righteous Mind | 9780307377906 | Haidt | 1x |
| Ok | Seems better than it is, and for today is probably an almost entirely useless book. Belongs to a specific period of US political turmoil where USAians were trying to figure out why they were so mentally damaged while they were being mentally damaged. | ||
| On Tyranny | 9780804190114 | Snyder | 1x |
| Ok | Maybe a good book for someone who never read anything but teenage literature in their lives or something. Didn't learn anything I already didn't glean from the combined knowledge from better books. I was a little bored but maybe I expected that. | ||
| Weapons of Math Destruction | 9780553418811 | O'neil | 1x |
| Ok | Very early 2010s type of “Heck Yea Science!” but negative book. Didn't learn much from it. I believe they did not mention capitalism in the book once, so because of that it's refusing to go to the root of the issue which is a monumental failure. Also, since we are now in the hellish future, in the modern algorithmic day, this book as a result has become wholly useless; just read the news for a week about the ‘tech’ world and see how horrible of a position we’re in. | ||
| World Order | 9781594206146 | Kissinger | 1x |
| Ok | Found it pretty pointless compared to On China. A complete afterthought book. | ||
| The Giver | 9780385732550 | Lowry | 1x |
| Ok | Middle-school classic that I remember is about killing old people but not much else. | ||
| Braiding Sweetgrass | N/A | Kimmerer | 1x |
| Bad | This borders on ok for the few pieces of wisdom it holds, but wow what a slog this was. The repetition was out of control, no editorial oversight. Indigenous culture deserves respect and careful study but this was not careful study, and this is obviously unknowable to me but I have a feeling that the fact that the editor didn’t have the stones to call this author out on this page-count padding repeating is such an indictment of typical bourgeois liberal tip-toeing around minorities… it makes me sick. | ||
| Five Days at Memorial | 9780307718983 | Sheri Fink | 1/2x |
| Bad | Poor Louisiana, and specifically New Orleans, shafted by politics and shafted by the weather. It’s too bad this was a really boring book, Katrina and all the events and people surrounding it as a whole is a very interesting topic – like the alleged horror stories that came out of the Superdome. Some imagery in this book, i.e. of the flooded hospital and whatnot was interesting but I had to skip large parts of it because it was really that dull. I hope one day there can be a ‘Katrina Revival’ and there can be some great movie or very compelling book that talks about the situation as a form of reflection perhaps. | ||
| Necropolis | 9781844163045 | Abnett | 1/2x |
| Bad | I don't even remember this book practically. Really quite a slog to go through for something so easy to make exciting. It's WH40k! How can you make that boring? | ||
| Ashfall | 9781933718552 | Mullin | 1x |
| Bad | What the hell was this book? An absolute disaster for an adult, a lurid fantasy for a teenager. It’s not rare to see an author self-insert as the smart, handsome, athletic protagonist. I can see him stroking himself while writing some of these scenes, him as a young teen meeting his 16 year-old muse. I only wonder why didn't I put it down, that is precisely when I realised I was reading the rest of this book to see the main character get maimed or die. Here he is reliving childhood fantasy. By the time they got to the FEMA camp near the end I realised the author didn’t have the stones to kill himself in this book, but of course not, he has sequels to vomit out! To a preteen who is not well-read this book would probably be pretty fun though. | ||
| Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? | 9781846943171 | Fisher | 1x |
| Bad | Completely understand the utility of this book and its importance, but I very much did not like the way it was written to the point where I thought it severely distracted from its message. I’m sorry Mark Fisher, I’m sorry to my parents, and I’m sorry to my peers. | ||
| The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class | N/A | Dutch Guy | 1/100x |
| Very Bad | The most unnecessarily dense and complicated book about an interesting subject. Written to make the Babylonian’s bureaucracy look trite, this book, this nearly-encrypted lockbox, wants to be as complex as Phenomenology of Spirit in syntax while trying to tackle a subject matter that could’ve been written to make accessible for any regular Joe-shmoe proletarian – AKA the audience that this book should be aiming for. It’s a wonder the editor didn’t kill themselves trying to decipher this mumbo-jumbo. | ||
| Capitalism and Freedom | 9780226264219 | Friedman | 1x |
| Very Bad | There was a moment in this book where I could see the beauty of what capitalism was despite my opinions, but it was wrapped in horrendously inhuman concepts that I wish were never visited upon this Earth. What a small and twisted man Milton Friedman was. Writing this book you can tell he thinks he's helping right the ship of society, he's so sure he's correct and anything to the contrary is an obvious folly. Milton Friedman's legacy will be death and destruction, good riddance. | ||
| The 2020 Commission Report on the NK Nuclear Attacks Against the US | 9781328573919 | Lewis | 1x |
| Very Bad | Trees had to die to produce this book. Someone spent the time, the energy, the effort to actually make the machinery that could produce this book. I think I disliked Command and Control more after seeing Schlosser give this useless turd praise. This thing was made for the sake of this guy's Twitter followers and it shows, my god it shows. This book is kindling, just look at the upper-right hand corner of the cover — it's already trying to self-immolate. It's a subliminal message from the cover designer to do what's best for the world and save everyone who was tricked into thinking they wanted to read this book's time and destroy this book. | ||
| Hitler's American Model | 9780691172422 | Whitman | 1x |
| Very Bad | Who was the editor/publisher who tricked this poor man into writing this book? This Atlantic article was somehow spun into a novel, a wasteful and ill-conceived one that helps no one understand almost anything they wouldn't have already known by virtue of being interested in this book. The suckers who were somehow simultaneously forced to publish this and also tricking him into writing it were so obligated against their will by contract to release it that it feels like the book was released by dropping off the shipment by parachute in the night. I became an angrier person after reading this book. | ||
| The Obstacle is the Way | 9781591846352 | Holiday | 1x |
| Meditations-lite. | |||
| Ego is the Enemy | 9781591847816 | Holiday | 1x |
| Meditations-lite-deux. Did make me want to experience ego-death. | |||
| Superforecasting | 9780804136693 | Tetlock & Gardner | 1x |
| A very interesting way of thinking about prediction; a very useful read. | |||
| A Short History of Nearly Everything | 9780767908184 | Bryson | 1x |
| A great stroll through many concepts presented in a breezy way. The one with pictures makes it even better. | |||
| Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down | 9780306812835 | Gordon | 1x |
| Fantastic book on engineering's core ideas. | |||
| The Zombie Survival Guide | 9781400049622 | Brooks | Many |
| A teenage favourite of mine. | |||
| 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School | 9780262062664 | Frederick | 1x |
| A fun, light book to read to get an overview on some design topics. | |||
| Why Information Grows | 9780465096848 | Hidalgo | 1x |
| This book occupies an empty space in my head honestly, not sure what to make of it. | |||
| Universal Principles of Art | 9781631590306 | Parks | 1x |
| Says it on the cover. I tried absorbing as much as I could from this book. | |||
| Universal Principles of Design | N/A | Lidwell & Holden & Butler | 1x |
| Same as above. | |||
| How to Use Type | 9781856698979 | Marshall & Meachem | 1x |
| Made me fall in love with Typography. | |||
| How to Think Straight About Psychology | 9780205485130 | Stanovich | 1x |
| Book on psych. Not much to say. | |||
| Neuroethics | 9780262514606 | Farah | 1x |
| A medical ethics book. | |||
| Design for Hackers | 9781119998952 | Kadavy | 1x |
| A decent intro on design for people who think design is secondary to consuming tech-baubles, but a decent intro nonetheless | |||
| In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World | 9780465029730 | Stewart | 1x |
| Fun math history read. | |||
| Neuroplasticity | 9780262529334 | Costandi | 1x |
| The brain is an extremely complex organ. This book only reinforced my belief that anyone can change into who they want to become. | |||
I'M FREE!