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things were read (#364): Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

But do you ever experience a sort of diluted, personalised version of that feeling, as if your own life, your own world, has slowly but perceptibly become an uglier place? Or even a sense that while you used to be in step with the cultural discourse, you're not anymore, and you feel yourself adrift from the world of ideas, alienated, with no intellectual home? Maybe it is about our specific historical moment, or maybe it's just about getting older and disillusioned, and it happens to everyone. When I look back on what we were like when we first met, I don't think we were really wrong about anything, except about ourselves. The ideas were right, but the mistake was that we thought we mattered. Well, we've both had that particular error ground out of us in different ways-- me by achieving precisely nothing in over a decade of adult life, and you (if you'll forgive me) by achieving as much as you possibly could and still not making one grain of difference to the smooth functioning of the capitalist system. When we were young, we thought our responsibilities stretched out to encompass the earth and everything that lived on it. And now we have to content ourselves with trying not to let down our loved ones, trying not to use too much plastic, and in your case trying to write an interesting book once every few years. So far so good on that front. (p220)

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things were read (#363): Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge:

I informed my father of my decision not to become a student. The timing was lucky: a rotten end of the month. "What are you going to do then?" "Work. I'll study without being a student." To tell the truth, I was too afraid of sounding pompous or of starting a great disputation of ideas, to dare to reply, "I want to fight as you yourself have fought, as everyone must fight throughout life. I can see quite clearly that you have been beaten. I shall try to have more strength or better luck. There is nothing else for it." That is pretty near what I was thinking. (p12)

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things were read (#362): Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

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things were read (#361): Luna - Wolf Moon by Ian McDonald

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things were read (#360): Luna - New Moon by Ian McDonald

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things were read (#359): Means of Ascent by Robert Caro

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things were read (#358): Nada by Jean-Patrick Manchette

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things were read (#357): How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm

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things were read (#356): New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

But when it comes to fighting the deep and unconscious habits of attachment which we can hardly dig up and recognize, all our meditations, self-examinations, resolutions and planned campaigns may not only be ineffective but may even sometimes lend assistance to our enemies. Because it may easily happen that our resolutions are dictated by the vice we need to get rid of. And so the proud man resolves to fast more and punish his flesh more because he wants to make himself feel like an athlete: his fasts and disciplines are imposed on him by his own vanity, and they strengthen the thing in him that most needs to be killed. When a man is virtuous enough to be able to delude himself that he is almost perfect, he may enter into a dangerous condition of blindness in which all his violent efforts finally to grasp perfection strengthen his hidden imperfections and confirm him in his attachment to his own judgment and his own will.

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things were read (#355): My Life as a Quant by Emanuel Derman

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things were read (#354): The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

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things were read (#353): The Path to Power by Robert Caro

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things were read (#352): Fratelli Tutti by Pope Francis

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things were read (#351): The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

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things were read (#350): Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

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things were read (#349): Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber

At this point, however, the principle has been exposed as a flagrant lie. As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do. Nothing would be more important than to wipe the slate clean for everyone, mark a break with our accustomed morality, and start again. What is debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom (real freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point, we can't even say. It's more of a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe. (p391)

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things were read (#348): Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño