What I've Read This Week

I started this blog and made my first post on June 12. Today is June 18th, and this post is my seventh, so this blog post completes my first week of posts. This week, since publishing my first blog post, I've done more reading than I do most weeks, and so I wanted to go through the books that I've completed over the past seven days. Here's what I've read this week.

Manufacturing Consent, by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

I didn't start this book this week, I started it a couple weeks ago, but I only finished it a few days ago. It's genuinely one of the most interesting books that I've ever read. This book is about the propaganda model describing American mass media and how what they report and how they report it conforms to government expectations and government policy. The book compares actions taken by the U.S. government to actions taking by the Soviet Union and compares how these actions were reported differently in the American media. It covers the reporting of the Vietnam War and other global events, and it was very interesting to see how the American media treat different cases. Although this book was published in 1988, it is still very relevant today, and I enjoyed reading it. It is hard to get through at points because of how academic it is, but it was worth it.

Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell

This is the third book I've read by Orwell, and it is by far my favorite. Animal Farm and 1984 didn't really interest me very much. I recognize that 1984 is an important and influential book, but I dislike reading dystopias because they seem very heavy-handed to me (and yes, I get that that's the point). Homage to Catalonia, however, was very interesting. It's about Orwell's experiences fighting for the leftist POUM militia during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Many English leftists traveled to Spain in order to fight in the Civil War, and Orwell writes about the experience, from the trenches to eventually having to flee the country. I enjoyed reading this, but I can see how people could find it boring, as it does drag at parts.

Blood in my Eye, by George L. Jackson

I found out about Blood in my Eye from Noname's Book Club, as it was her pick for the month of June. This book is probably the most radical book that I've read recently, but I really enjoyed reading it. This book was written in 1971, and George Jackson completed it only a couple weeks before he was murdered in his jail cell in San Quentin. Jackson was a member of the Black Panther Party and was a strong Communist. This book is a collection of both chapters that he wrote and letters that he sent to his friends from jail. He was only in jail for stealing $70 ten years earlier, when he was sentenced to "one year to life", and he became radicalized in prison. This book is about his belief in the need for guerilla warfare against police and for the need of an absolute revolution and the complete dismantling of capitalism. It also contains his definitions of fascism and his assertions that America, (or, as he calls it, Amerika), is a fascist state.

Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Davis

This book is a fairly short read, but it's packed with information. In this book, Angela Davis describes the horrors and origins of the American prison system and advocates for prison abolition. She writes about the racist and sexist issues with prisons and about the horrors of the prison-industrial complex and the usage of prison labor for large corporations. Angela Davis is an incredibly inspiring activist and even though this was written fairly recently, in 2003, she retains the same level of intelligence and analytical ability as she had as an activist in the 60s. I really want to meet Angela Davis and talk to her, and after reading this book I want to continue to read her work.

The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

This book is very short, and I read all of it today. It's the most famous in popular culture out of all of the books on this list, and it is by far the weirdest. Kafka's own name is practically a synonym for bizarre due to the things that he wrote about. Written in 1915, The Metamorphosis, or Die Verwandlung in the original German, is about a man named Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one day to find that he has turned into a giant insect. This book is creepy and strange, and it's also sad, as you see the main character struggle to communicate with his family who are terrified of him (since he's a giant bug). I am very glad that I don't think of the type of things that Kafka did because if I did, I would never be able to get to sleep at night. Despite the weirdness of the plot, I did enjoy this book, as it's too short for the horror of it to really affect you too much.

Now that I'm done with this post, I have completed a week's worth of blog posts. I enjoy writing these, and I hope that those of you who do read them enjoy them.

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