Welcome to the final reading list post of 2022! Don’t worry, there will be more in January 2023. But there won’t be any more this year. So what have I been reading at the end of 2022? Read on to find out. And, as always, let me know what you’ve been reading.
Category: Books (Page 8 of 22)
These are posts about books from the blog Base and Superstructure. Occasionally I’ll read a book worth talking about, and write some thoughts on it. These cover a wide range of topics from the blog.
The Utopia of Rules
This post is about David Graeber’s book The Utopia of Rules. But that’s not what comes to mind when most people think about Graeber.
Upon his fall 2020 death, many leftists rushed to define the work and legacy of David Graeber. The socialist left tended to focus on his work with Occupy Wall Street and his book Debt. By contrast, the mainstream press focused on the more popular book Bullshit Jobs. And both sides had a word to say about his final book The Dawn of Everything, which formed a kind of grand synthesis of his historical and political views.
That’s all well and good. I’ve read each of these books and written about a couple. Graeber’s work follows a familiar pattern – insightful, but problems tend to lurk.
But I think The Utopia of Rules is where we should go if we want to find Graeber’s most compelling work. In it, he goes after bureaucracy, especially its history and its shaping by the modern world. Though it wanders into the more speculative realms of social theory, it hits a key topic from several angles. And so, that’s our topic for today.
We’re headed for another Midwestern winter, and it’s time for yet another edition of the reading list! Even though the baseball season has been done for a week or so, I included a couple of (final?) baseball books. Along with it, we’ve got some politics and sci-fi.
Enjoy! And let me know what you’ve been reading lately.
Now that we’re fully into the fall and the postseason is going, let’s look at yet more baseball for this month’s reading list! For this month, I’m pairing the baseball with some politics and a TV show.
Hope you enjoy, and let me know what you’re reading!
So, I recently read W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous 1935 history of the Civil War era, Black Reconstruction in America. Like most leftists, I’ve read a million excerpts from the book over the years. Not to mention many other Du Bois texts – Dusk of Dawn is a personal favorite. But I hadn’t read Black Reconstruction until now. Let’s say a word or two about it.
