i mainly read non-fiction of a "trying to understand/overthrow capitalism" type, usually histories. in terms of fiction, my heart is primarily with sf (octavia butler and kim stanley robinson being my tops, i'd say).
perpetually frustrated i don't read more.
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J. Sakai is one of North America’s most insightful and challenging radical intellectuals, best-known for …
Well worth reading for sakai fans, but if you're not yet there are better places to start.
So much relies on science. But what if science itself can’t be relied on?
Medicine, education, psychology, health, parenting – …
@peoplelikebooks creating one from scratch. when i search a book and it doesn't show up, i click "manually add book" at the bottom, and it takes me to wyrmsign.org/create-book which says 403 Forbidden
Do other people get a 404 error when they try to add a book? Not finding a couple titles by search
The Story of a New Name (Italian: Storia del nuovo cognome) is a 2012 novel written by Italian author Elena …
J. Sakai is one of North America’s most insightful and challenging radical intellectuals, best-known for his work Settlers: Mythology of …
People rave; I found much to like but overall a bit of a drag. I am told it improves as the series progresses....
A brilliantly imaginative talent makes her exciting debut with this epic historical military fantasy, inspired by the bloody history of …
From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History …
Content warning pretty general description of the premise with some non-specific discussion of the themes of the ending
Bref: It's not perfect, but I highly recommend it.
Takes place in Oxford in the 1830s. Very historical, except that the industrial revolution is the "silver industrial revolution", powered by the ability of linguistic scholars to do magic by writing a word and its translation on either side of a silver bar, with what is lost in the translation being manifested into the world.
I enjoy magic systems in fantasy that feel somewhat "hard" (defined, rulebound) and while the metaphor isn't subtle, I quite liked it. The industrial revolution is powered by the exploitation of the Third World and capital.
At times I found the unsubtlety of the politics in general a bit draggy, but for a very mainstreamy adventure romp it was pleasant for that dragginess to be like "the British empire and whiteness must be destroyed for humanity to live" and not like "love is the most powerful force in the universe". There's a bit of a tendency for identity to equal political alignment in a simplistic way, which is probably my biggest political issue with it, but again, that's so much better than most well-written, well-plotted fantasy adventures, that it's hard to be mad at it.
Non-specific discussion of the ending:
There's an element of the ending inflating the power of individuals -- very much contrary to the highly materialist and systemic critique of the book -- but, like the unsubtlety of some of the politics, this has countervailing things that undercut it and is excusable in the interest of making a good story. But in particular, I enjoyed the reading of the ending that is offered, that it's not actually as significant as the characters sometimes express. That dramatic political events are often powerfully motivated by grief, and there exists an irreconcilable tension between strategy and affect, each impotent without the other.
A combination of grief, historical sensibility, and political project is EXTREMELY my weakness.
I highly recommend it.
This book had a really dramatic fall off for me. For the first couple chapters I was super into it, partly because it did that way of laying out a debate I can sort of situate myself in but don't entirely understand the history of (the debate about the role of imperialism in the birth of capitalism), and then making the opposite camp's argument (capitalism came about due to class relations internal to England, and only after developed imperialism) very compelling.
But then it fell off for me pretty hard, because it seems she has a very pure idea of what capitalism is that is in her brain but not very much given to us and then historical examples are tested against it. When she starts saying the Dutch Republic not being capitalist because so much of their wealth was buying basic necessities from eastern europe where labour was cheaper, …
This book had a really dramatic fall off for me. For the first couple chapters I was super into it, partly because it did that way of laying out a debate I can sort of situate myself in but don't entirely understand the history of (the debate about the role of imperialism in the birth of capitalism), and then making the opposite camp's argument (capitalism came about due to class relations internal to England, and only after developed imperialism) very compelling.
But then it fell off for me pretty hard, because it seems she has a very pure idea of what capitalism is that is in her brain but not very much given to us and then historical examples are tested against it. When she starts saying the Dutch Republic not being capitalist because so much of their wealth was buying basic necessities from eastern europe where labour was cheaper, it was really like "i think the same argument would apply to the only form of capitalism I have ever been alive for". It just becomes a bit tautological: capitalism originated in England, because before that there was no economic system that looked like what began happening in England in the 17th century.
Which ended up reinforcing my previous tendencies, instincts, in associating the "birth in england then spreading outward from there" crowd with the abstracted models of Marx's Capital rather than actual history, where a pure capitalism never appears.
Glad I read it. If you want a very readable summary of academic Marxist debates about how capitalism originated, it's first section is very good for that.
