📖 End of April Book Journal

Firstly, I want to thank everyone who recommended a book in this blog post. It was amazing seeing people muse about their favourite books and being able to respond! Thank you so much I hope I'll at least be able to read some of them very soon! And if you're reading this right now and haven't recommended something, please do!

Secondly, I started this book journal at a very weird spot in April (middle of the month, I believe) so after this one you probably won't see me again until the end of May! By then, I'll have probably finished more books than I currently have right now. It should also be stated that I don't talk about some books in my currently reading list because I'm not actively reading them. I seem to like picking up and forgetting about books more than finishing them

Take care and see you next month!

CURRENTLY READING!
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein.

I'm only acquainted with Klein's works as I've had to read a chapter from This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate for a political ideologies elective in third semester of college (and I really recommend watching the documentary of the same name). Whereas that one was more about the undeniable link between our capitalist world and climate change, this one is about the mess of the free market. And that's all I really know about it! I'm excited to read this one.

Other books I'm currently reading: Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, translated by Sidney Monas; On Marx: Revolutionary and Utopian by Alan Ryan; The Plague by Albert Camus; The Snag by Tessa McWatt; The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky; Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence by G.A. Cohen; The Marx-Engels Reader
FINISHED READING!
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.

A book with merits, which is not saying a lot. This book was published more or less a year after Trump's first election. The implications are there, since Snyder doesn't want to name him directly, but is fine name-dropping Putin, Hitler, and the like. This book is full of American patriotism of the liberal kind - the one that toes the line of radicalization but fears of being labelled as a socialist just because you believe in free healthcare, human rights, and housing for all. If you're a communist like I am, an anarchist, or anything adjacent, this book is really nothing and it says nothing new while also painting the United States as if it's greater and full of better potential than it actually is. It's short and relevant, that's really all it has going for it. You will not get any sort of useful information out of something that is short, however. You must read and you must dig and you must analyze critically. Even as a baby's first antifascist book it's weak.

What I will recommend in response to this is this document called what do we do after the revolution fails? which comes from this Tumblr user. This is where I learned about and subsequently checked out Demand the Impossible from the library.

Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism by Seyward Darby.

A book I had a far better time reading. While fascism, the alt-right, and white nationalism are a bullheaded by prominent male figures like Richard Spencer, women like Ayla (Wife With a Purpose) and Lana Lokteff are the dulcet voices of the movement. Some of them even take to social media as tradwives, made to stay at home, to look after their husband, and care for the children, all the while romanticizing the life they have and saying that this life should be the norm - that they are just upholding Christian values. White Christian values, that is. "Tradwives and white nationalists share core objectives (more babies), myths (America's moral decline), and iconography (happy heterosexual families). [...] When a tradwife mentions threats to "European culture" and "Western civilization," she's borrowing euphemistic language from white nationalists. When she talks about protecting her children from multiculturalism and black-on-white crime, she's all but reading from the hate movement's proverbial handbook." This one was an insanely interesting read, one that I picked up while watching Fundie Friday's video about Ballerina Farm as being white nationalist propaganda (it's 2 hours long but I really recommend it). There were many good quotes which encapsulated the book, so I'll put some here:

"White nationalism is not a monolith. Supporters come from varied social, religious, and political backgrounds. [...] What they share is an outlook defined by binary thinking and perceived victimization. Flattened and facile, white nationalism possesses a near-apocalyptic sense of urgency: The time is now or never for white people to protect their own kind."

"Choice feminism is liberation in the eyes of the beholder, celebrating the fulfillment of women's personal desires over the dismantling of harmful hierarchies and ideologies. Author bell hooks once described feminism as "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression." Choice feminism isn't that: It's the belief that every decision has equal value so long as a woman makes it. If a woman decides to do something, it must be feminist. [...] In practice, choice feminism is too often about safeguarding privilege under the guise of individual liberty."

"Lana didn't wear a Klan robe or keep a Nazi flag flapping in the breeze outside her home. Her belief system, however, was all but indistinguishable from women who did. She inflicted injury by unilaterally limiting the definition of harm and then doing what fell just outside it. If a person was hurt by what she said or did, it wasn't her problem. Except, of course, it was. Lana provoked fear and antipathy as a matter of business. Bigotry had become her livelihood."