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Wook Byrm

serge@ramblingreaders.org

Joined 11 months, 4 weeks ago

was ist dein lieblingsbuch?

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2024 Reading Goal

53% complete! Wook Byrm has read 7 of 13 books.

commented on The Will to Change by bell hooks

bell hooks: The Will to Change (2004) No rating

Everyone needs to love and be loved -- even men. But to know love, men …

This book is an absolute treasure! I've been stopping on every second page, thinking about my life and experiences with masculinity and love, and having a little self-therapy session.

On the current page, bell hooks postulates that talking about genuine love is much more of a taboo than sex, which is actually a fairly casual topic, certainly not as taboo as we're made to believe.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Amal El-Mohtar: Worlds of Exile and Illusion (Paperback, 2022, Tor Books) 5 stars

I've read somewhere that the first three book of the Hainish Series more romantic and less 'articulate' than the later works of Ursula Le Guin, and I can definitely feel that. For me as a non-native English speaker (reader?), the language is a bit too convoluted and not as direct as e.g. in 'The Dispossessed'. As I recently became a dedicated Le Guin fanboy, I decided to go through these novels anyway.

Alexander Berkman: ABC Of Anarchism (Paperback, 1964, Left Bank Books) No rating

It's outdated in many ways. It's very man-oriented and directs its message to men. The focus is on the proletariat and production, completely ignoring the fact that most work is actually care & maintenance. It's also very absolutist and utopian about communism. By that I mean that Berkman describes the process of communization as binary switch, arguing that no middle ground is possible after the revolution. The experience of Rojava gives us the hindsight that it is in fact possible and even necessary, as with any radical change, to introduce it gradually. Overall, I'd recommend this book for someone who's already acquainted with anarchism and wants to learn the history of anarchist thought.