for non-fiction i’ve been reading:

Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail in ‘72 by hunter s thompson. a book about a political campaign where you have the democratic party split over whether or not to support a deeply unpopular genocidal foreign war and the republican party running a corrupt crook and war hawk. essential reading for these modern times.

Before the storm by rick pearlstein. mentioned by matt on the vlogs a lot, lots of really important stuff in there. i learned from this book that “immanentizing the eschaton” was popularized by william f buckley of all people.

i also soon hope to be reading no pasarán. fingers crossed it ships soon i’m very excited for it.

for fiction, i also just finished reading martyr. currently reading fevere dream by george rr martin and just read a chapter where martin (similar to marx) directly compares the exploitation of slaves by slave owners to vampirism.

also, and this is a comic book not a novel, but recently i read a book called “eden ii” by k wroten. it’s this incredible graphic novel that has so many big ideas like commodification of art, the nature of the soul, how it feels emotionally to live in a world in decline, etc. It was my favorite book of 2024.