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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-08)
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Hi, I am your new unclehusband, and we are in love. With end of the semester chaos consuming my life at the moment, I haven’t had time to make my first post. Near the beginning of 2022, I started keeping a list of every book I read, in order, for posterity’s sake. So, I thought I’d share that list for my first Flounder post, with brief reviews on a select few. I kind of get stuck in these moods where I'll only read one genre for a while, so the first few are all history, but there's other stuff too, I promise.
For full disclosure, books marked with an asterisk in the 2023 list were assigned readings for a European history class I’m in. Some of those books I didn’t read cover-to-cover, depending on how busy I was with other classes, although I read enough of each to at least get the gist of them.
---------------2022---------------
--The German Ideology by Marx and Engels--
This one was technically a re-read. I first read it a few years ago for a “European Intellectual History” class, which was about as pretentious as it sounds. That said, this book influenced the way I think about history more than maybe anything else I’ve read. It’s probably the fundamental text for understanding Marx’s materialist conception of history. The book is basically a polemic against Marx’s contemporaries, German philosophers in particular. So, it’s written in a kind of bitchy, sarcastic style, making it really entertaining. For example: “German philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love.”
--Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years by Russ Baker--
--Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo--
This book is a Marxist critique of liberalism, meaning ‘liberal’ in the classical sense, encompassing the political traditions of pretty much every ‘western democracy.’ Losurdo sort of challenges this idea that liberalism was always more progressive than the feudal relations preceding it, especially when it came to race and/or colonized people. At its core, liberalism is about individual property rights, and some of its staunchest champions were Southern slave owners and rabid colonialists. Losurdo closes out the book arguing the atrocities of the twentieth century were merely the logical conclusion of liberal ideology. No one cared when the same atrocities were committed against brown people outside of the white imperial core. One detail that I still think about all the time is this insane idea conceived by Emmanuel Sieyes. If you don’t know, Sieyes was an early titan of the French Revolution’s liberal phase (before the so-called radical phase), who wrote the famous essay, “What is the Third Estate?” A few years later, he floated the idea of breeding black people with monkeys to create a permanent slave race. So, that is what I think of whenever some annoying libertarian guy calls himself a “classical liberal.”
--Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis--
This one is kind of in the same vein as the previous, but covering a more specific event. Davis details the world-historical famines of the 1870’s-1890’s that killed somewhere between 30 and 60 million people. The famines corresponded with particularly devastating El Niño cycles, which are periodic climate shifts in the tropical Pacific, resulting in higher temperatures/drought in the western Pacific, and heavy rain in the eastern Pacific. While the climate disaster was undoubtedly a key factor in the famines, Davis argues the high mortality rate was primarily a product of European colonialism and market capitalism. For example, in China, the state usually kept vast grain reserves to mitigate famines, but when it was forcibly integrated into the global capitalist system, these state-owned reserves were liquidated and sold in the free market. Likewise, the British forced Indian farmers to sell their grain on the market, even during intense famines. At least the Brits were kind enough to offer relief programs, like labor camps where the starving masses could work themselves to death in exchange for moldy bread.
--A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin--
I spent the better part of last summer reading the A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) series. I binged the GoT show during the early part of the pandemic and loved it, at least the first five or six seasons. Anyway, the books rock. They’re kind of like Lord of the Rings in the sense that they’re so descriptive and atmospheric, and with really incredible world building. I read somewhere that the series was partially inspired by real historical events, specifically the War of the Roses, which I think is why it feels so grounded. Sure, there are dragons and zombies and some magic, but their narrative impact is always secondary to the characters and the choices of those characters. Speaking of which, there are a ton of characters to keep track of, with like forty different points of view throughout the series. It can be annoying at times, but usually it’s not an issue since almost all of the characters are really engaging. I particularly like all the Lannister POV’s. They’re way more interesting than the Starks, sorry. I hope GRRM releases Winds of Winter soon, but I know he’s busy with his 87 HBO spin-offs. He really is one of the world’s worst villains.
--A Clash of Kings by GRRM--
--A Storm of Swords by GRRM--
--Feast for Crows by GRRM--
--A Dance with Dragons by GRRM--
--Stalin: Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo--
--The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins--
Bevins covers the horrifying story of an American-backed military coup in Indonesia in 1965. Acting on CIA ‘kill lists,’ the new right wing military junta proceeded to slaughter over a million suspected communists in less than a year. What’s crazy is that I finished reading this the same day the Indonesian government publicly acknowledged the mass killings for the first time.
-------------------2023-------------------
--The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin--
I was interested in this book before really knowing anything about it. What drew me in was that it was one of the first books published in China to appear in western best sellers lists. I’ve been really fascinated by modern Chinese history/society the last few years, but sometimes it can be hard to get a grasp on it with the language and cultural barriers, and the constant barrage of anti-Chinese propaganda in the Western media. The Three Body Problem immediately satisfied that itch for me, starting off with events set during the Cultural Revolution. Beyond that though, it’s just an incredible sci-fi novel in its own right, with pretty mind-blowing concepts. The title refers to a real phenomenon in orbital mechanics, in this case three stars orbiting each other in a seemingly unsolvable pattern. One of the main plotlines revolves around solving this pattern to prevent the destruction of a civilization caught in the middle of these three stars. The author (Liu Cixin) has a background in physics, and the concepts he lays out get pretty technical, so some of it went over my head. But at its core, the book’s about a plucky scientist getting caught up in events way above his pay grade. And aliens. The prose is a bit clunky at times, but I think that’s to be expected with a translation between two very different languages. This is actually the first in a trilogy of books, and I’m definitely going to read them all.
—The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan—
--Dune: Messiah by Frank Herbert--
--Children of Dune by Frank Herbert--
I’ll just cover the Dune series as a whole, or at least the first three I’ve read. I saw the 2021 Dune movie and loved it, so I bought the book a couple weeks after. Just like Game of Thrones, the Dune series reminded me of Lord of the Rings in its extensive description and world building. I know making another LotR comparison makes me sound like that meme where the guy who’s only seen Boss Baby watches his second ever movie and says “getting serious Bossy Baby vibes from this.” But anyway, the Dune books also feel like the inverse of LotR in many ways. The latter is all about hope, love, the higher ideals of man, etc, while the former is much more cynical, morally ambiguous, and bleak. Tolkien likes to align personal morality with the greater good, while characters in Dune are forced to make seemingly immoral choices for the good of their communities, or humankind in general. The way Herbert deconstructs and criticizes religion through the machinations of the Bene Gesserit are also in stark contrast to Tolkien’s Christian imagery. Given these reasons, it’s not surprising that Tolkien apparently hated Dune. That said, I think they’re great. They explore so many themes relating to ecology, evolution, politics, technology, etc, and their interdependent relationships. In some ways, I can understand why some people might not enjoy them, though. At times, the characters can feel a little inhuman and unemotional, but I think that’s kind of the point. Paul, his kids, Alia, and Jessica are vessels for exploring concepts, rather than characters in a traditional sense. At the same time, there’s a very human yearning to renounce all their responsibilities to these higher concepts and carve out a space for their own autonomy. The wider universe of Dune is also really interesting because it’s not quite dystopian, but in many ways it’s undoubtedly bleak, with humanity reverting back to a feudal system, and interspace travel/commerce monopolized by a cartel of the leading families in the galaxy. Unfortunately, this sounds like what actual space colonization would hypothetically look like, since all the funding and resources are in the hands of people like Elon Musk. On the bright side, he’s probably too much of a fuck up to actually get something like this off the ground.
--All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque*--
--Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev*--
The central theme of this book is overcoming vast generational differences in a rapidly changing world. It’s set in late nineteenth century Russia, but I was surprised how prescient it felt. One of the main characters is caught up in the nihilist movement popular in Russia at the time. I thought he was really funny because he’s living out this phase that so many young men (including myself) go through. Like, leaving your small town for college, smoking weed for the first time, losing your religion, that kind of stuff. After thinking you’ve laid bare the banal and uncaring nature of the universe, you return home and shock your relatives with your new profound knowledge, renouncing their entire way of life. In many ways, you may even be right, but you go about it in the most annoying way possible, convincing no one and alienating everyone.
--Ourika by Claire de Duras*--
--Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad*--
--Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi*--
—God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert—
—Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder by Dave McGowan—