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
Thinking...
Ishmael
Thinking...