Now that I'm back to a place where I can walk into a bookstore and actually be able to read the books there, it's all I can do to stop myself from buying a bunch. I'm a book junkie. Luckily, I can't afford to indulge in this vice right now, and I just keep reminding myself of the shelf of books that I've bought in the last couple of years and still haven't read. I just looked over there and yikes! - There's about 25 of them!
Anyway, I have a list of new ones I want to read.
There's one that I actually did break down and buy and read a couple weeks ago, at a reading and signing: The Fountain at the Center of the World, by Robert Newman. It was one of the best readings I've ever been to, the guy is so completely entertaining and knowledgeable. The book is an amazing novel, a piece of political fiction that takes place against a backdrop of globalization, privatisation, and the protests thereof. It's about 2 brothers born in Mexico, separated when very young - one grows up in England and becomes a PR flack for big corporations, while the other stays in Mexico and grows up to be an activist and sabateur.
The book is almost like the fictional accompaniment to We Are Everywhere, and having just read that and just come back from a long trip to South America, it was the perfect book for me.
Other books I've recently found out about and want to read:
--Craig Rosebraugh's "The Logic of Political Violence": someone at the video collective meeting yesterday was suprised I didn't know about it when I expressed pleasant shock at seeing it. Well, when did it come out? Oh, 3 or 4 months ago. Well, how long have I been travelling and out of touch with new books being published? 4 months!! Anyway, I've been interested in Craig's jihad against non-violence dogma for a while now so this is a very interesting publication to me.
-- "Change the World Without Taking Power", by John Holloway
-- "Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World ", by Eduardo Galeano
-- "The Open Veins of Latin America," by Eduardo Galeano
-- "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig
-- "The Anarchist in the Library" by Siva Vaidhyanathan
These are 2 books about intellectual property, mostly, that I just found out about thanx to a blog entry by chuck. I feel it is my duty to keep up on this issue, even though I confess to being less and less interested. I've been involved in the struggle against totalitarian IP for over a decade but it just seems like there are other issues that are a lot more urgent right now. Isn't it crazy that there's people who don't have land to live on or food to eat and we're here worrying about not being able to legally duplicate a DVD? ugh.
Maybe I should get rid of some of the books in my to-read pile. A lot of them I no longer am as interested in. Isn't that fucked up? My reading backlog is longer than the churn of my interests... argh....
Posted by steev at Abril 9, 2004 10:30 AM