Books

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Books

Sources

• https://openlibrary.org/◇ Belongs to the Internet Archive. Attempts to catalog all books, includes descriptions, ratings, library and purchase links.
• Wordcat.org◇ Library site
• ISBNDB◇ Most extensive DB; commercial site.
• Bookwyrm◇ Federated social reviewing site.
• Project Guttenberg◇ “a library of over 70,000 free eBooks”
• Better World Books ◇ “Better World Books is your online destination for books offering the widest selection of used and new books. We give booklovers across the world access to the power of knowledge at an affordable price and help them stay connected through reading. We better the world, one book at a time, by making a difference with every purchase made through donations and environmental programs. It’s simple: Buy Books. Do Good.”
• The Pirate Bay ◇ The Pirate Bay often has entire collections of an author’s books, some of which are otherwise out of print and difficult to obtain.
• The Anarchist Library ◇ an archive focusing on anarchism and anarchist texts.
• Robbie’s stuff◇ an E-book wiki, with v some interesting books for download in PDF format
• Charles Roth MPC RIP “The cultural detective.”
• Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem (online orders)

“20 sites where you can download books for free”

• Project Gutenberg.com
• Open Library.org
• Google Books.com
• ManyBooks.net
• PDF Drive.com
• Bookboon.com
• Free-Ebooks.net
• Smashwords.com
• DigiLibraries.com
• GetFreeEbooks.com
• Obooko.com
  
• Baen Free Library.com
  
• Internet Archive.org
  
• HathiTrust.org
  
• Standard Ebooks.org
  
• ReadPrint.com
  
• Bookrix.com
  
• Librophile.com
  
• Online Books Page.edu

Services, lists

• Librarycat.org : “TinyCat is a simple, fast, and clean way to manage your small library.”
• Litterature des 5 Continents : Listing (in French) of books from every country; some with reviews

Read, partly read, or obtained

• The Patterning Instinct, by Jeremy Lent
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler : ” In this sci-fi classic, a young protagonist builds her own Earthseed religion in an America ravaged by the climate crisis and social inequality.”
• The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekara
• The Coin, by Yasmin Zaher
• Against Identity Reviews: Scottsman , Our Daily Read, The Critic
• Perdido Street Station (China Mieville) Began to read this (June 25).
• leviathan Wakes First book of the Expanse series. Listened to this as an audio book, on my walks. Now on the second book.
• Arséne Lupin (Maurice Leblank) Reading this on and off, as an ebook.
• Le Pays des Autres (Leila Slimani) Great book, sensitively written – still reading.
• Dora Bruder (Patrick Modiano). A very good, typically Modiano novel.
• The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler : Review. Enjoyed. Wrote about it here.
• Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp Excellent.
• Notes on Complexity “The Theory of Life, Consciousness, and Meaning in a Self-Organizing Universe” : Interesting. I don’t know of any other book that looks at metaphysics from the point of view of the scientific theory of complexity.
• Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra (2022) (purchased on Kobobooks) : Follows the lives of highly successful Indians as they interact with the world. Enjoyable, though it took me a while to get into the novel. Read in 2024
• The Dawn of Everything (David Graeber and David Wengrow) : Purchased this as an audiobook and read in 2023. Fantastic book. Challenges our perceptions of past societies and allows one to imagine a different future.
• Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson) : Very interesting and thought-provoking
• The Climate Book (Greta Thunberg) Excellent. Everyone should read
• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk : Enjoyed, reading notes

To read: topics, authors, books, notes

Topics

Climate change and capitalism

• see Capitalism – George Monbiot links
• Geo-engineering
• Green New Deal
• The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a planet in crisis, by Amitav Ghosh : Review
• Technofeudalism – Yanis. Varafoukis

Recommended book links

• Les Champs de la Lune
• The Mishomis Book
• Braiding Sweetgras  : a 2013 nonfiction book by Potawatomi professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, about the role of Indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complementary approach to Western mainstream scientific methodologies.
• Best books of the 21st century

• ‘Le bonheur du néant’ by Sunethra Rajakarunanayake, translated into French by Janaka Samarakoon https://suriyakantha.org/fr/article/prema-puranya-or-le-bonheur-du-néant
• “The novel first captivated me with its remarkably fluid, boundary-breaking format—a striking departure from the conventional local literary scene when it was released 25 years ago in Colombo by Vidarshana, an obscure yet daring young publisher.
• “It appeared to seamlessly blend fiction with non-fiction: carrying the expansive sweep of a novel, while hinting at an intimate touch of autofiction—its authenticity, however, remaining ambiguous. At the same time, it could be seen as a hybrid—part novel, part collection of short stories. Both profoundly intimate and eminently sociological, the work defies easy classification, thriving in its contradictions.”

Authors of interest

• Perry Rhodan

• German Sci-Fi writer

• Valerie Perrin

• Cory Doctorow

• Unauthorized Bread

Vandana Shiva

• One earth one humanity vs the 1%

Bruno Schultz

• Sanatorium hour glass (also movie)

W S Sebald

• On the natural history of destruction

Rohzin Rahman Abbas

Sayaka Murata

• Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change – 2 stories
• Earthling
• Convience Store Woman

Fredrich Jamison

Thomas Piketty

Listen: “Thomas Piketty’s Case for ‘Participatory Socialism’” by The Ezra Klein Show

• A Brief History of Equality

Katherine May

• author and podcaster living in Whitstable, UK. Known fo, “Enchantment”, “The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Time”, “The Electricity of Every Living Thing”. Hosts series of podcasts on her site, has a Substack blog.

Reading list

• The World after Gaza – Pankaj Mishra
• Daybreak in Gaza
• Illuminations by Alan Moore
• The Wheel of Time – Robert Jordan (fantasy) : (recommended by musician Hania Rani
• 10:04 by Ben Lerner ] : [Review](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/04/10-04-review-ben-lerner-great-writer reminds of Sebald
• Leaving the Atocha Station  : Review
• Julia, by Sandra Newman : Review “‘1984’ gets a new life, and a fresh perspective, in ‘Julia’”
• The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem
• Your Kids Are Not Doomed” by Ezra Klein
• Design for the Real World” by Victor Papanek
• The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
• El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis : Part of the The Essential Mike Davis series. “A magisterial melding of global ecological and political history, disclosing the nineteenth-century roots of underdevelopment in what became the Third World*
• Late Victorian Holocausts : Late Victorian Holocausts
• Half Earth Socialism

Notes

• Interviews with writers: The Ezra Klein Show (podcasts)  : with Kim Stanley Robinson

Booker prize 2023

‘Soul-shattering’:  Prophet Song by Paul Lynch wins 2023 Booker prize https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/26/prophet-song-paul-lynch-booker-prize-winning-novel-ireland-fascist-control
The other titles shortlisted for the prize were

• The Bee Sting
• by Paul Murray,
• Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
• This Other Eden by Paul Harding
• If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
• Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
• In 2022, Shehan Karunatilaka won with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, set during the Sri Lankan civil war. In 2022, Shehan Karunatilaka won with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, set during the Sri Lankan civil war.

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