I bought Tom Ballard’s I, Millennial as a Christmas present for my mum this year, and I’m now frantically reading it before I have to wrap it up to give it away 🤣 It’s so good! I always knew he was a leftie, ever since Tonightly (RIP) did an item on the Marxism conference and it was actually positive, lol. This book is both riotously funny and a genuinely Marxist denunciation of capitalism. My mum is going to love it 🤣
Posts categorised ‘Books’
Link: “The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler”
I haven’t quite read all of Octavia E. Butler’s books now (I still need to read the Earthseed ones) but I’ve read a lot, and overall she’s one of my favourite authors. I found this an interesting piece about her life, and her struggles. Truly a legendary talent… whose life seems to have been cut short by medical negligence 😢
Link: “Freedom and Creative Vitality in a Market Society: Ursula K. Le Guin on Saving Books from Profiteering and Commodification”
Blog post about how Ursula K. LeGuin (one of my heroes, insofar as I have such a thing!) opposed the commodification of literature, and other creative works. This really resonated with me – the profit motive, and publishers’ desire for “marketable” works over “good” ones, are so toxic and counterposed to what actually motivates creativity.
Esperanto’s Influence on Orwell’s Newspeak
A couple of times in recent weeks I’ve seen some discussion about Newspeak in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and whether it was influenced by, or how it could be translated into, Esperanto. After all, Newspeak infamously uses words like “ungood” for “bad”, which is unironically parallel to Esperanto’s standard word for bad, malbona.
It seems like …
The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson
In Granada in 1492, on the eve of its fall to Isabella and Ferdinand’s forces, a spirited concubine takes her best friend, a gay map-maker with an incredible power, and makes a daring bid for freedom. (★★★½)
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
Space opera with a big ensemble cast, about humans organised into a post-capitalist society on a spaceship forming part of the Exodus Fleet. (★★★½)
Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Mexico City, 1971. Maite’s neighbour goes missing, having entered the orbit of some radical students at the advent of Mexico’s Dirty War. Sick of feeding her cat, Maite goes to track her down, but she’s not the only one. (★★½)
Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
Shori is a young vampire who awakens in a cave, badly injured and with amnesia. She finds out that her entire family has been murdered. With the help of some bonded humans called symbionts, she pursues justice in a vampire society she must learn about from scratch. (★★★★)
Link: “What it really means to work in the book industry”
Informative article about how dire the pay & conditions are for workers in Australia’s publishing industry, not to mention the paltry remuneration for authors (58% of which earnt less than $2,000 for the entire year of 2021).
Wiki: Dracula
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Bram Stoker. Told in an epistolary format (through letters, diary entries and newspaper articles), it starts by following solicitor Jonathan Harker as he goes on a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian noble, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town …
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.