Wednesday 29 June 2016

What I've Been Reading Recently

My brain needs a night off from the crisis, so let's have the quarterly list of books my eyes have nommed up. There's a lot.

The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer
Theorizing Patriarchy by Sylvia Walby
Either Side of Winter by Benjamin Markovits
How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less by Sarah Glidden
Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts by Leigh Phillips
The Rules of Sociological Method by Emile Durkheim
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte
The Information Bomb by Paul Virilio
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Mailman by J Robert Lennon
Technology and the Future edited by Albert H Teich
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
Visits from the Drowned Girl by Steven Sherrill
Digital Sociology by Deborah Lupton
Israel: A Colonial Settler State? by Maxime Rodinson
The Impact of Science on Society by Bertrand Russell
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Good Wives by Louisa May Alcott
Philosophy and Sociology of Science by Stewart Richards
The Rainbow by DH Lawrence
Towards a Surveillant Society by Thomas Mathiesen
The Death of Grass by John Christopher
Metro 2034 by by Dmitry Glukhovsky
Labour's Identity Crisis edited by Tristram Hunt
Surveillance Society by David Lyon
Wastelands edited by John Joseph Adams
The Purple Cloud by MP Shiel
Media, Risk and Science by Stuart Allan
Plan for Chaos by John Wyndham
Surveillance Studies by David Lyon
The Social Control of Technology by David Goodridge
Women in Love by DH Lawrence
The Complete Stories by Zora Neale Thurston
Questioning Technology by Andrew Feenberg

A few there I've been wanting to read for ages. What have you been reading?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The City by Tony Norfield, a Marxist analysis of the City of London that the FT found convincing in its review - and a reminder that the City is not just about jobs and tax revenues, it is a vital hub of global imperialism.

Mike

david walsh said...

As an old sci-fi man, I hadn't known that there was a vintage John Wnydham work out there that hadn't been published before - and now looking at a review, I see it covers all the favourite themes of UFO driving Nazis................

I will have to get a copy.

Can I also recommend for any Labour Councillor involved in the new Combined Authorities (or like me, old hands who sat on RDA's and Regional Assemblies) a 1960's Penguin Sci-fi classic - "Mandrake" by Susan Cooper, later an Observer writer, which postulated the end of civilization as we know it through the setting up of Regional Authorities in the UK by Mr Secretary of State Mandrake, a kind of combination of Michael Heseltine and John Prescott, but which was his tool to unleash deep and devilish "earth forces" into society.

I purchased this in 1965 and still treasure it. I gather a on line book seller whose name is banned has a few copies going very cheap indeed..................

Phil said...

I'll keep an eye out for that.

And no, I didn't no about the rediscovered Wyndham book either until finding it. Not as good as his other stuff, but he was doing Nazis and flying saucers pretty much before anyone.

Mark Walmsley said...

Have you got a favourite book on Israel Phil? Just looking for recommendations.

Phil said...

I'm not an expert on Israel nor, truth be told, is it an area of especial interest. But the Rodinson book mentioned here was very good. If you want a Marxist analysis of the Zionist movement and the foundation of Israel, it seems like the place to go.