What are you currently reading?

[Mickey]

Really makes you think.

[lennytheweedwhacker]

i try not to

[Simple Torture]

Heads up ST, I'm going to be reading 2666 in the next few months.

Excellent. I think I last read it in late-ish 2019.

[Simple Torture]

Heads up ST, I'm going to be reading 2666 in the next few months.

Excellent. I think I last read it in late-ish 2019.

Actually, Goodreads tells me I read it in 2009, 2014, and 2018.

[lennytheweedwhacker]

kiss up

[BurtReynolds]

Reading this now. Jesus Christ.

Human population explosion continues exponentially to the point that we can't die fast enough to stop the planet being covered in dead bodies. Quadrillions of humans live on earth. Killing people becomes a moral good.

200 pages of carnage, nihilism and despair.

10 stars out of 10!

[Birds in Hell]

Sounds great, thanks for the rec!

Helen Andrews’ Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster is published today, have been looking forward to it for a while.

[washing machine]

Reading this now. Jesus Christ.

Human population explosion continues exponentially to the point that we can't die fast enough to stop the planet being covered in dead bodies. Quadrillions of humans live on earth. Killing people becomes a moral good.

200 pages of carnage, nihilism and despair.

10 stars out of 10!

Without spoiling too much, what happens to all the bodies in a situation like that?

[Malloy]

[BurtReynolds]

Reading this now. Jesus Christ.

Human population explosion continues exponentially to the point that we can't die fast enough to stop the planet being covered in dead bodies. Quadrillions of humans live on earth. Killing people becomes a moral good.

200 pages of carnage, nihilism and despair.

10 stars out of 10!

Without spoiling too much, what happens to all the bodies in a situation like that?

They pile up and become a resource in themselves.

[Higgs]

I found Dune in a 2nd hand book store and grabbed it as I've never read it (or seen the movie).

Literally on page 1 and surprised at how happy reading the phrase "old crone" just made me.

What a great term.

[Mickey]

Second time. What an incredible book.

[Simple Torture]

At the start of WWII, Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat, heads a great Viennese shipping company. He detests the Nazis, and when his board of directors asks him to go along with confiscating a neighbor’s large parcel of land for their thriving wartime business, Jessiersky refuses. Yet, without his knowledge, the board succeeds in sending the owner of the land, a certain Count Luna, to a Nazi concentration camp on a trumped-up charge.

Years later the war is over, but after a series of mysterious events, Jessiersky, deeply paranoid, becomes convinced that Count Luna has survived and seeks vengeance; driven to kill the source of his dread, he decides to hunt down Luna—and his years-long chase after the spectral count finally takes him deep into the catacombs of Rome …

[4/5]

So I have about a month left that I can buy books and be reimbursed through work. Looking for recommendations, would love to read some stuff that's totally out of my comfort zone. Simple Torture?

Mickey, I'd like you to recommend me something endorsing a marxist/leftist economic system. So much of what I read is centered around different ideas about market systems (and criticisms of command systems), I'm in the mood to read a good argument in favor of a command position. Whether it's more practical or theoretical is up to you.

[Mickey]

Hmm, that's a hard question--much of the Marxist work I read and find useful works at the level of description rather than prescription, trying to understand capitalism as a system (and, primarily, its relationship to cultural representation--so the names I really find useful are folks like Jameson, Lukacs, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, etc.). Probably the best historical analysis I've read in a while is Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, which is about capitalism's intrinsic tendency towards crisis. I also really enjoyed Ellen Wood's The Origins of Capitalism, and it does a lot of work to set up capitalism as a unique relation of production. Obviously in each of those there's an implicit critique of capitalism from which you can extrapolate the author's preferred position. But for something more prescriptive, I'll have to think.

[Malloy]

Hmm, that's a hard question--much of the Marxist work I read and find useful works at the level of description rather than prescription, trying to understand capitalism as a system (and, primarily, its relationship to cultural representation--so the names I really find useful are folks like Jameson, Lukacs, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, etc.). Probably the best historical analysis I've read in a while is Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, which is about capitalism's intrinsic tendency towards crisis. I also really enjoyed Ellen Wood's The Origins of Capitalism, and it does a lot of work to set up capitalism as a unique relation of production. Obviously in each of those there's an implicit critique of capitalism from which you can extrapolate the author's preferred position. But for something more prescriptive, I'll have to think.

what about wolff, panitch or erik olin wright?

[lennytheweedwhacker]

will finish kavalier and clay soon and will probably pick empire falls back up next...i read maybe half of it last late summer, early fall

[epilogue]

Bluebeard's Egg by Atwood

[washing machine]

will finish kavalier and clay soon and will probably pick empire falls back up next...i read maybe half of it last late summer, early fall

Oh man. Empire Falls hit me at the right time. I know it's not what I was supposed to take from it exactly, but it really made me want to lean into the F&B industry. The idea of a mom & pop diner where your service really makes the difference in someone's day really appeals to me.

[washing machine]

Reading and being haunted by this at the moment.