Tender Is The Flesh
One of my homegirls gave me this book to read. She prefaced the book with the fact that it was a very disturbing read for her. She told me that the premise of the book is a look into a world where human cannibalism is regularly practiced and legal. Not something that I necessarily get squeamish about, but horrifying nonetheless. After reading the book over a couple of weeks it left me with a sense of disgust and wonder. Would humans really devolve into this type of debauchery simply because animal meat is off the table? Can we so quickly forget our own humanity and succumb to eating one another? It surely is a harsh world out here but I don’t think I'm so easily convinced of what the book is trying to elaborate on. I don’t think that in a total loss of cattle we would succumb to such debased behaviour. Unless, as the book illustrates, money is involved. Total annihilation of a sector of the economy is not fathomable to the elites, so instead of helping society switch to a vegan based lifestyle, they decide to double down. Raise humans as cattle and sell society their meat at an upcharge. This is when the disgust set in, the book illustrates a world working as intended. Capitalism will sooner sell you the dead bodies of children as a luxury cuisine than buckle under the weight of its own contradictions. We will sooner see an island of wealthy elites enslaving children for sexual gratification than the liberals who helped build this rotting carcass of a culture admit that maybe, they were wrong. Maybe, it won’t end with the death and psychological trauma of millions of babies outside the borders of the west. Maybe, it ends when not only is this structure consuming your body to stay alive, it's consuming your children’s too.
All About Love
This is the type of book that will have you introspecting about yourself for days. It will have you double-taking for the rest of your life on whether or not you are truly loving those around you. Hooks does a great job of wrapping all of this into the material conditions we all come from and the systems that affect us on the day-to-day. After reading this it made me want to be a more vulnerable and honest person with those that I love or want to love. Currently re-reading this with my mom and I've recommended it to pretty much everyone I know. Read it! Hopefully it will open you up to love deeply and feel deeply loved like it did for me.
Society of the Spectacle
A dense book...So dense that I did not finish it. Got halfway through and decided to put it down. Debord illustrates a concept that we all feel on a daily basis but often cannot articulate. The spectacle being this enigmatic pervasive force that lulls us all into this facade of fake living. Depicting signs and images that are not indicative of our actual lived reality but become so powerful that we end up accepting them and acting them out anyways as if they are. He explains all of this through short punchy paragraphs where he uses byzantine wording to explain a semi-complex topic. I dropped it beecause there are other authors who explain what he is talking about better and in a less complicated way. Does Debord bring up some good points about how we are all being mass hypnotized by consumerism and capitalism, how we have started to associate our identites with the things we own or perceived allegiances we flex, and how this is by design so that the ruling class can continue to obfusicate class solidarity and labor power. Yes. He does, but when writing about working class issues maybe consider writing FOR the working class audience. Don't have time to parse over every single word in this book. I like Debord and have recently found a deeper appreciation for his contributions with the situationists. It still stands though that if you are trying to understand how capitalism keeps us in a haze I would recommend listening to Richard Wolff or reading Michael Parenti.
Oryx and Crake
A fun Speculative fiction book that one of my friends let me borrow. Margret Atwood (who also made the handmaid's tale) delivers a story where we are at the end of the world with a man named snowman. A new human race is in the first stages of developing culture and he is considered their prophet. The book bounces between snowman's life before the apocalypse and present day leading the new humans. A great story about the hubris of man, the dangers of not questioning why when creating new technologies, and how at the end of the day we are not god. We still feel, and when given so much power, with your emotions coming and going, we can make drastic decisions that effect not only us but potentially everyone.
Ring Shout
What a wonderful novel. It really gave the feeling of reading something that you could envision being a movie. Sadie was my favorite character, I love how playful she is while still lugging around a rifle everywhere. The premise is immediately captivating too, what if the KKK were actually just demons from another dimension and we had black female demon slayers running around destroying them? Hard to mess something like this up. I was sad to find out that there isn’t a sequel. Apparently, they are producing a TV series based off the book, so I guess I will be waiting for that.
Ishmael
My very best friend lent this book to me so I had to read it immediately. A wonderful story about a man learning what it means to live within the rhythm of nature. Very thought provoking but somewhat idealistic in the way it views past humans. Lucky for the author, I have a soft spot for hopeful idealism. Maybe someday we can return to the society of leavers. Where nature and man walk side by side in unity. It sure would beat living here in the belly of the beast, struggling because of made up systems that only benefit the few. Sigh…maybe it did all change with Harambe dying. With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?