Book Recommendations

Recommend the rest of the forum members some good books to read.
I'll start:
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

Also:
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Author Conan Doyle
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson
The Once and Future King, T.H. White
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein
A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
The Idiot, Feydor Dostoevsky

I love The Lord of the Rings as well as The Idiot, even though I'm only halfway done with it.

In addition to those two books, some good ones are:

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell is fantastic. I just bought it today and don't plan on sleeping until it's done.

Red Aegis wrote:Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell is fantastic. I just bought it today and don't plan on sleeping until it's done.

Homage to Catalonia is one of my favorite books and definitely the finest accounts of the Spanish Civil War ever published.

It was sheer coincidence that I did a search for it at the store computer. It was in the Fiction section strangely enough. I usually stick to the Non-Fiction and Biography parts so it was very lucky that I found it. I picked it up and read for two hours in the store, came home and read some more.

Red Aegis wrote:It was sheer coincidence that I did a search for it at the store computer. It was in the Fiction section strangely enough. I usually stick to the Non-Fiction and Biography parts so it was very lucky that I found it. I picked it up and read for two hours in the store, came home and read some more.

It's definitely difficult to put the book down once you've started it.

Orwell does not exaggerate the extent to which the Communist Party of Spain and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party sabotaged the revolutionary achievements of the CNT-FAI. Unfortunately, he seemed rather oblivious to the role which the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (the militia of which he was a member during the war) had in undermining those achievements as well. It's a great tragedy which should serve as a lesson to us all.

I watched several hours of speech from David Graeber both on anarchism and his book: Debt: the first 5000 years. It has convinced me that it would be a good read and is now on my queue of books.

Red Aegis wrote:I watched several hours of speech from David Graeber both on anarchism and his book: Debt: the first 5000 years. It has convinced me that it would be a good read and is now on my queue of books.

Graeber's anthropological research is quite interesting. I've been meaning to read his work for some time now myself.

Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel, by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos

"Christian anarchism has been around for at least as long as �secular” anarchism. The existing literature cites Leo Tolstoy as its most famous (sometimes even as the only) proponent, but there are many others, such as Jacques Ellul, Vernard Eller, Dave Andrews or the people associated with the Catholic Worker movement. Both individually and collectively, these Christian anarchists offer a compelling critique of the state, the church and the economy based on numerous passages from the New Testament. Yet despite the relevance and growth of this literature, no generic study bringing together these different thinkers or reflecting on their contribution has been published to date, because such work involves meticulous searching, compiling and structuring of countless different texts and sources, not all of which are easily accessed. This book, however, provides precisely such a study, and thereby presents Christian anarchism to both the wider public and the wider academic community."

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7106065-christian-anarchism

The Philosophy of the Revolution by Gamal Abdel Nasser and The Green Book by Muammar Gaddafi. Both are available as PDFs.

Finnish Nat-Bol wrote:The Philosophy of the Revolution by Gamal Abdel Nasser and The Green Book by Muammar Gaddafi. Both are available as PDFs.

There are some really good ideas contained in Gaddafi's Green Book, especially the stuff on participatory democracy. However, I'd really like to read more on Libyan history to find out how much these ideas were actually applied.

Entfremdung wrote:

Finnish Nat-Bol wrote:The Philosophy of the Revolution by Gamal Abdel Nasser and The Green Book by Muammar Gaddafi. Both are available as PDFs.

There are some really good ideas contained in Gaddafi's Green Book, especially the stuff on participatory democracy. However, I'd really like to read more on Libyan history to find out how much these ideas were actually applied.

I have been troubled with the same thing. I know that Gaddafi and others resigned from their posts at the time of the establishment of the Jamahiriya and I've heard that some of Gaddafi's proposals were voted down by the people. I've also watched many videos from Libya, both during and after Gaddafi, in which people show support for him. However, I've also heard some Libyans call him a dictator and such. When opinions among Libyans are so diverse, it's hard to judge. Especially when you don't know those Libyans yourself.

Finnish Nat-Bol wrote:I have been troubled with the same thing. I know that Gaddafi and others resigned from their posts at the time of the establishment of the Jamahiriya and I've heard that some of Gaddafi's proposals were voted down by the people. I've also watched many videos from Libya, both during and after Gaddafi, in which people show support for him. However, I've also heard some Libyans call him a dictator and such. When opinions among Libyans are so diverse, it's hard to judge. Especially when you don't know those Libyans yourself.

AFAIK the general consensus is that Gaddafi (along with his family and tribe) maintained a tight reign on power and that the democratic constitution was somewhat of a smokescreen. I do, however, believe Gaddafi was a highly idealistic individual but very ruthless and vengeful when things did not go his way. He did good for Libya as well as bad. It is sad that the country has now been torn apart and there is so much sectarian violence.