This is by no means exhaustive, and its entirely possible – indeed certain – that in typing it up I’ve forgotten some of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. However, it’s a start, and I may well add to it as time goes on and new titles come to mind.
I’ve limited this list to books. In non-fiction, and especially in matters of social theory, articles can be hugely important. But the purpose here is just give some ideas of things I like that are easy to grab from the library if it strikes your fancy. Skip down a ways to by-pass my obsession with history and theory and get to the stories instead.
Non-Fiction
Marx’ Grundrisse in combination with Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx – Brutally hyper-academic, but damn, if you can get past that….
Harry Cleaver’s Reading Capital Politically – For a quick and pretty easy take on why Marx matters, and why so much Marxism doesn’t.
Stephen Biko’s I Write What I Like – Dispatches from the emergence of black consciousness in the South African liberation movement. Not theory, not a guide to action, but the organizing-writings of a man who fundamentally re-shaped the anti-apartheid struggle, and the first person who ever taught me white is a colour
Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa – a classic on the plunder of a continent.
Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost – Colonialism is one brutal motherfucker, that much we all know. But this, the story of how King Leopold of Belgium managed to claim a colony not for the state but as his personal property, and the devastation he and his “civilizers” unleashed…let’s just say it’s its own kind of evil. Leopold’s Congo was the basis for Jospeh Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, on my fiction list.
Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy (Genesis, Faces and Masks, Memory of Fire) – There are some who write damn good history, but few who can pull off something like this. Galeano tells the history of the Americas – and particularly the history of struggle and resistance – through a sequence of vignettes, with no overarching narrative required. Might take some time to get into, but it’s worth it.
Maria Mies’ Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale – Fabulous, classic analysis of global capitalism and the intersections of gender, race and class
Marioarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’ The Power of Women and Subversion of the Community – A staple of autonomist Marxism, this critique of orthodox Marxism and the Communist Party left is one of the best statements I’ve seen on gender and class, and on the depth and breadth of anti-capitalist struggle.
Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down – During England’s civil war of the 1640s, dozens of radical – reall fucking radical – movements sprang up around the country, reclaiming common lands, celebrating sex and drunkenness and disorder, fundamentally threatening Church and state in a wave of struggle that simply has no other parallel in the country’s history. A few of those remain in a form the originators wouldn’t recognize – Quakerism, for instance. More interesting, however, are the most dissenting of the dissenters – Levellers, Diggers, and – my personal favourite – Ranters.
Paul Collins’ The Trouble With Tom – Never read any Tom Paine, but after this book it is definitely on my list. Paine was the revolution in the American Revolution, the impact of his life – and his death – felt across continents and in every major radical tendency in the US since his time. This book follows the curious path of Paine’s bones after his death, showing at each stop the extent of his influence on everything from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to underground distributors of birth control in the nineteenth century.
Howard Zinn’s People’s Histiory of the United States – If you haven’t read it, read it. It’s just that fucking simple.
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble – Never been a post-structuralist particularly, and even less have I managed to read enough to grasp its nuances. It is easy to see why this became so influential, however. Materialism’s still here, though not quite as explicit as I like it, and discussion of labour is noticeably-absent. Still, an important, important book on how we do and re-do gender.
Midnight Notes Collective’s Midnight Oil: work, energy, wawr 1973-1992 – A great anthology from this anarcho-Marxist-post-structuralist collective based in the Boston area. The common theme – class struggle, autonomous action by working people to drive capital into crisis and resist its austerity-centred counter-attack.
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality vol. 1 – If you never read another post-structuralist, read Foucault. Solid, materialist analysis of how institutions of control are made and remade.
Andre Gunder Frank’s Re-Orient – Gunder Frank became seen as a bit of a but in his later years, but I always liked him a lot. Here he breaks from his former comrades in world systems theory and takes on the basic myths of economic history. An angry rant, and whether you’re convinced or not, he’ll give you lots to think about.
Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White – Analysis of whiteness has really exploded in recent years, and Ignatiev has been on the frontlines of anti-racist work with his Race Traitor journal. Here’s a good intro to the processes and struggles by which race is made.
Robert Michel’s Political Parties – A committed Marxist, one huge book, and a descent into fascism. That’s Michels. He puts his finger here the fundamental problem of working class organization. He couldn’t find his way out – convinced that to be a socialist you needed to resolve the tension somehow. Disillusionment, despair, and a less-than illustrious political ending.
John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards. Saul is no radical, but this is a very very good book about the political and economic hijacking of concepts such as reason, rationality and science.
Fiction
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in tandem with Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes – Confession here. I actually don’t like Heart of Darkness as a novel. I think, though, that it is a really fucking important book historically and politically. Lindqvist’s analysis is a fabulous read – back and forth between this and the text is the only way to get through Conrad and get the most out of him.
John Le Carre’s Absolute Friends and The Constant Gardener – I blogged about Le Carre at one point, about his books in general and Absolute Friends in particular. Actually, there are probably better stories than these. But keeping with the general leftism of my lists, and because these represent a more overtly-enraged Le Carre, their the ones I’ll note. Anarchists, socialists, Cold War opportunism and the post-911 terror state. Absolute Friends has all this with Le Carre’s classic themes of how regular folks make state security and intelligence networks, and the boundaries of morality in profoundly amoral worlds. The Constant Gardener is in a different vein, but a fabulous story of pharmaceutical companies, underdevelopment, and corporate-sponsored research. Don’t settle for the movie.
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children – Superb telling of post-colonial Indian history and partition in particular.
M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lal – These are the two standouts in Vassanji’s work. The first an examination of Tazanian history, and particularly of the Indian community. through the later-found diary of a colonial administrator. The second tells the life of an Indian Kenyan’s slow and almost accidental path to become one of the most notoriously corrupt and despised men in the country.
Jonathan Safran-Foer’s Everything is Illuminated – This book is really quite astounding. Fine magical realism tracing a young man’s journey to uncover his family’s pre-holocaust history. Simply brilliant. Skip the movie and read the book.
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – Not the best book I’ve read, but one that makes the list because the first three-quarters is so important. A grand tale spanning several families and generations, and exploring the question of race in the UK – whiteness, blackness, religion and culture, class and policing, liberalism and reaction.
Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote – It’s often called the world’s first novel, and it’s a damn good read. One man against the world, and the interaction of madness and western civilization on the brink of modernity.
Emile Zola’s Germinal – A miners strike France’s coal district in 1860. “Beneath the blazing of the sun, in that morning of new growth, the countryside rang with song, as its belly swelled with a black and avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon their ripening would burst open the earth itself.” Read this book.
John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and In Dubious Battle – I fucking love Steinbeck. All of these are must-reads. Work and no-work, strikes and battles with the cops, masculinity and love, and the dreaming that sustains us through the slag.
Earnest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea – I won’t argue against the prevailing wisdom that he was a drunken misogynist, but I fucking love Hemingway. Farewell to Arms is quite simply a great book about love and struggle, set in Spain’s anti-fascist resistance. But The Old Man and the Sea – wow. A book in which a man essentially sits alone in a boat, fishing, for the duration, and yet I was spellbound. Now that’s a writer.
Jose Saramago’s The Double – Saramago’s writing style takes some getting used to. There’s not a lot of passion here. But there is a great story and some quite captivating writing. A man picks up a movie, and sees his mirror-image in one of the minor characters. Obsession, secrecy, and madness. Great fucking book. No wonder this guy won the Nobel Prize.
Everything else by Saramago, too. Blindness, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Stone Raft amd every single thing this guy has written. Saramago is my new great love. Full stop.
Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory – History, spirituality, political violence from Haiti to New York’s Haitian community. A damn good book.
Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – I’ve decided I really like Mark Haddon. These are easy to read, funny stories, but he writes wonderful characters and does a good job poking at what lies just behind normalcy. A Spot of Bother sees a middle-aged man go mad quietly; The Curious Incident explores the relationship between an autistic teenager and his father. Both fun and very insightful takes on how families drive us crazy.
Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance – Like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, this traces Indian post-colonial history through the lives of a number of characters. A fine fine book.
Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang – Meg introduced me to this one, and damn am I ever thankful. Nineteenth century Australia, banditry and cops and what happens when a working class grows, quite explicitly, from a penal colony. Told as scraps of Kelly’s diary, the text takes some getting used to, but it’s an amazing bit of historical fiction.
Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes – An accordion passed along ties together what is otherwise a series of short stories on the various waves of immigration to the U.S., the making of America and the making of Americans. And she’s simply a great writer to boot.
Andre Dubus’ House of Sand and Fog – The moveie was alright, but the ability of Dubus to capture complex interactions of race and gender and class in this book, all through the telling of a simple but powerful story – it’s simply magical. Disappointed in the last few pages, but it’s a book that I find myself thinking on fairly regularly.
Edward P. Jones’ The Known World – Historical fiction about black slave-owners and this making of race in America from a writer good enough to win the Pulitzer. That ought to be enough of a reason to read it.
Pat Barker’s trilogy – Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road. Centred around a mix of fictional characters and historical figures, the series traces the lives of World War 1 soliders sent to a mental health facility for reasons ranging from shell-shock to homosexuality to anti-war agitation. Real-life soldier-poets Wilfred Owen and Sigfreid Sassoon join the made-up socialist-turned-officer and sometimes intelligence-investigator Billy Prior, all of whom are treated by the very real Dr. Rivers – a psychiatrist charged with reparing damaged fighters and getting them back to the front, and for whom the war increasingly brings back recollections of his one-time anthropological research in the South Pacific. This a is a brilliant trilogy on the psychology of war, the impact of World War 1 on Britain, the realtionship between soldiering and panics about homophobia. Read it.
Jose Saramago again, this time with Blindness . A whole city is struck blind, but for one woman, and the novel explores the relationship between, on the one hand, our sociality, our humanity, and on the other, our sense of acountability and our ability/ willingness to hold others accountable. How does percieved invisibility anonymity inspire some to a greater care and a greater collective intimacy and others to a staggering barbarism? Saramago is an absolute master.
Cormac McCarthy’s, post-apocalyptic imagining in The Road. So much of this sub-genre emphasizes danger, adventure, the physical threat of post-civilization. McCarthy’s vision is refreshing in that it largely eschews all this for something much more haunting and much more real – a telling of the apocalypse that emphasizes emtipiness and silence. Space, time, alone-ness, and humanity in a landscape largely devoid of humans.
