Celebrating the long Christmas season isn’t complete without the perfunctory greetings. So let me begin one. But instead of the usual directive to simply “enjoy” the break, allow me to wish everyone a meaningful holidays. May genuine peace and justice reign for our own and all the people of the world. And may we all contribute in bringing this about by living the Christmas spirit of hope and solidarity the whole year round!
The present worsening crisis of the world capitalist system has led to the intensified exploitation and oppression of the toiling masses all over. More imperialist wars, state repression, and reactionary ideas and movements rise and are bound to rise to prop up the status quo. Those coming from the middle class are not exempt from this politico-economic turmoil as opportunities for their joining the ranks of the class above them dwindle even more.
In particular, the economic crunch has resulted in lesser money at hand in my own case and thus the resultant crippling of the capability to indulge in the ordering of more books. In a sense, this would be a sure way of compelling me to make do with my present burgeoning pile of unread tomes from Book Sale: Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Franzen’s The Corrections, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, Melville’s Moby Dick, Zola’s Germinal, all the Hemingways, the Steinbecks, the Dickens, etc. And then there’s still all the Jamesons and Saids and Žižeks and other “post-isms” online, not to mention the Lenins and the Maos.
It would be a shame to just stick mainly to the more readily available Western canon, academic critical theory, and radical texts.
In the last quarter of the year, I’ve been reading a host of disappointing books: Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, Montalban’s Murder in the Central Committee, Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey, Walden Bello’s The Food Wars, Alan Furst’s The Foreign Correspondent, etc. Some more titles (Enriquez’s Subanon and Pomeroy’s Ang Gubat) as well as the solution to this problem I’ve already written about in a previous post.
Alain Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis and Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, meanwhile, also don’t really meet my expectations of the two. Nonetheless the engagement with these two contemporary radical philosophers have been fruitful in reaffirming and refining my own views and convictions (Perhaps a future post is in order for this). But still unsatisfactory even so.
In fact, In Lieu of a Field Guide has a list of books that he’s read this year that I wished I myself had read: Javier Marias’ Your Face Tomorrow, Natsumi Sōseki’s Mon, César Aira’s The Literary Conference, W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, etc. I’ve read a mere 15% of the wonderful titles listed there. I wonder when I can get a hand on those books?
Thankfully, the international and domestic political and economic crises are not eternal! As the people’s collective resistance to the tyrannical logic of capital and adherents of emancipatory social transformations mount, the days when problems of equal access to literary and scholarly texts persist due to the financial constraints of the impoverished majority are surely numbered. ■
Sending holiday cheer to you, Karlo! Here’s to great books in the next year, and to lasting social justice.