Saturday 31 March 2018

What I've Been Reading Recently

I do love a good book, don't you? And to prove it here's the traditional tri-monthly list of all the books to have passed before my eyes since we last did one of these.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Walking Dead Vol 27: The Whisperer War by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard
Walking Dead Vol 28: A Certain Doom by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard
The Postmodern Political Condition by Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi De Lampedusa
The Return of the Political by Chantal Mouffe
Here's Nagan by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
A Sociology of Mental Health and Illness by Anne Rogers and David Pilgrim
All Out War by Tim Shipman
Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity by John Marks
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Cousin Pons by Honare de Balzac
Deleuze and the Political by Paul Patton
Cambodia Year Zero by Francois Ponchaud
The Adjacent by Christopher Priest
The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron by Tim Bale
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame Smith
China Fights for Freedom by Anna Louise Strong
Capitalism without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke
Through Bolshevik Russia by Ethel Snowden
The Smell of Hay by Georgio Bassani
A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe
Cameron and the Conservatives edited by Timothy Heppell and David Seawright
The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma by Lima Barreto
An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker by Keith Ansell-Pearson
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

What books have tided you over since the beginning of this year?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Enemies and Neighbours by Ian Black is an excellent general history of Palestinian/Zionist relations from WW1 to 2017. Clear and compelling. The symbiotic relationship between Western imperialism, Zionist racism and corrupt Arab elites never ceases to shock and nauseate.

In contrast, perhaps the worst pro-Palestinian book I have ever read is The Biggest Prison on Earth by Ilan Pappe. A subject as important as the reasons for, and Palestinian experience of, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 deserves a careful and nuanced analysis where the many accumulated injustices speak via finely tuned scholarship and prose. Pappe, by contrast, appears to have written his text in one prolonged fit of undergraduate rage and delivered the resulting unedited first draft of the manuscript to the publishers. So badly written and argued, he actually does his subject a disservice.

Mike

Walsie said...

We, by Zamyatin was voted by the blessed St Orwell to be his "fvourite book".Also pleased to see you've had time for Olaf Stapledon, a now-forgotten pioneer of reflective sci-fi.

Dialectician1 said...

So, how are you getting on with Freddy N?

Phil said...

Decided subsequently to give him the body swerve for now - concentrating on Deleuze and recent political theory, and the Tory party. Head mess much.

Jason said...

J R Ackerley Hindoo Holiday
D H Lawrence Aaron's Rod
Christopher Isherwood A Single Man
Lawrence Durrell Bitter Lemons
Denton Welch In Youth is Pleasure
Denton Welch Journals
Freya Stark Baghdad Sketches
Paul Fussell Abroad: Interwar British Teavel Writing
Linda Colley Captives
Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island
Eric Newby What the Traveller Saw
E M Forster Where Angels Fear to Tread
Archie Fire Lame Deer Gift of Power

Joseph said...

Just wondered what you made of Olaf Stapledon. I live in the town in which he lived at one time. I've only read parts, but did not persist!

Phil said...

I thought they were great - proper feats of imagination!