I got a preprint of this wonderful novel from the author, and I finally got around to reading it. I enjoyed the book immensely: it is hopeful and imaginative and will appeal to anyone interested in alternative visions of our climate crisis future. I was especially a fan of the co-housing developments that appear throughout.
Summer Reading: Either/Or
I like The Idiot much better, but this book was still insightful and funny.
Summer Reading: Life is Short
I had high hopes for this one, but found it pretty jargon-filled and inaccessible. Thankfully, it was actually quite short.
Summer reading: The Idiot
My daughter has been pestering me to read this for months and I finally got around to it. It took a while for me to warm up to it, but in the end I fell in love with the narrative. And now I must start the sequel…
Summer reading recommendations on Lit Hub →
Just on the Horizon: Nine Utopian Books to Deprogram Our Brains
Kristen R. Ghodsee Recommends Thomas More, Aldus Huxley, and More
Summer reading: Work, by James Suzman
A fun romp through history and why we should all be working less. Daisy has taken this lesson heart, although it did not take much convincing.
Summer reading: 24/7 by Jonathan Crary
So many thoughts on this book…
“We are now in an era in which there is an overarching prohibition on wishes other than those linked to individual acquisition, accumulations, and power.” page 111
“Everyone, we are told–not just businesses and institutions–needs an ‘online presence,’ needs 24/7 exposure, to avoid social irrelevance or professional failure. But the promotion of these alleged benefits is a cover for conditions in which privacy is impossible, and in which one becomes a permanent site of data-harvesting and surveillance.” page 104
Summer Reading: Bride of the Revolution
“If the heavenly city of Communism could have been entered by dint of Krupskaya’s labors, Russia would have become the world’s first perfect society years ago.”
Summer reading: Comrade by Jodi Dean
This was a fun essay on political belonging, and reminded me of a conversation I had with a Bulgarian of Turkish ethnicity back in the late 1990s about the Bulgarian word for Comrade, Drugar. I wrote about this encounter for an essay in my 2011 book, Lost in Transition: Everyday Life After Communism.
Summer Reading–Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai
Finally, the semester is over and I have some time to catch up on my reading. I literally have 17 books on my nightstand (or on the floor near it) waiting to be read or reread. I started off with this 2020 reader from an art project done in Sweden in the 2017-2018 academic year. It’s an eclectic collection of essays and interviews reflecting on the importance and relevance of Kollontai and her work today.
Summer Reading: The Called Us Enemy
I love this little graphic novel by original series Star Trek actor George Takei, who was interned as a child during World War II. Very moving and also more proof at how shitty our government has been to people of color during its history.
Summer Reading: Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist
Continuing with my theme of awesome Russian/Soviet women, I’ve spent a lot of time this week with Inessa Armand. This woman had five children and still managed to help foment revolution. Talk about work/family balance!
Summer reading: Lady Death
This is an English translation of Soviet sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s memoir. She is officially credited with 309 confirmed kills in 1941 and 1942. I especially enjoyed the chapters where discusses her travels in the United States with Eleanor Roosevelt.
Summer Reading: Avenging Angels
A fascinating look at some of the Soviet women who served as snipers in the WWII.
Summer Reading: Maxim Leo's Red Love
I started this book over a year ago but then put it down and life happened. I finally managed to finish it and it is a lovely tale of an East German family and the complicated history of the GDR. Wonderfully written and quite poignant.
Summer Reading: Feminist CIty
An interesting introduction to the field of feminist geography.
August special for all e-books of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism →
Hachette is doing a promotion of my e-book this month. It’s only $2.99 for the whole month of August.
Summer reading: Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind
““...the rightist totalitarian program was exceptionally poor. The only gratification it offered came from collective warmth: crowds, red faces, mouths open in a shout, marches, arms brandishing sticks; but little rational satisfaction. Neither racist doctrines, not hatred of foreigners, not the glorification of one’s own national traditions could efface the feeling that the entire program was improvised to deal with the problems of the moment.”
“The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgements and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling. Because they were born and raised in a given social order and in a given system of values, they believe that any others order must be ‘unnatural,’ and that it cannot last because it is incompatible with human nature. ”
“Wherever there is a crisis, the ruling classes take refuge in fascism as a safeguard against the revolution of the proletariat.”
“Whoever would take the measure of intellectual life in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe from the monotonous articles appearing in the press or the stereotyped speeches pronounced there, would be making a grave error. Just as theologians in periods of strict orthodoxy expressed their views in the rigorous language of the Church, so the writers of the people’s democracies make use of an accepted special style, terminology, and linguistic ritual. What is important is not what someone said but what he wanted to say...”
“The reader of today is in search of hope, and he does not care for poetry that accepts the order of things as permanent.”
Summer reading: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“We want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. ”
“To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of angels. ”
“For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an undifferentiated universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. ”
“All of us are prisoners to a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise. ”
“The best progressive ideas are those that include a strong enough dose of provocation to make its supporters feel proud of being original, but at the same time attract so many adherents that the risk of being an isolated exception is immediately averted by the noisy approval of a triumphant crowd. ”
“It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense. ”
Summer Reading: The Light That Failed
“After the fall of the Wall, across-the-board imitation of the West was widely accepted as the most effective way to democratize previously non-democratic societies. Largely because of the moral asymmetry it implies, this conceit has now become a pre-eminent target of populist rage.”
“...even for the inhabitants of economically successful countries such as Poland, the project of adopting a Western model under Western supervision feels like a confession of having failed to escape Central Europe’s historical vassalage to foreign instructors and inquisitors....A feeling of being treated disrespectfully was also fomented by what can be reasonably identified as the central irony of post-communist democracy-promotion in the context of European integration: the Central and East European countries ostensibly being democratized were compelled, in order to meet the conditions for EU membership, to enact policies formulated by unelected bureaucrats from Brussels and international lending organizations. Poles and Hungarians were told what laws and policies to enact, and simultaneously instructed to pretend that they were governing themselves.”