Moonhead
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Joined: 9/21/2009
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As there's a few people in P&R who have only ever read one book (the shitawful Atlas Shrugged) I'm going to suggest a few tomes that these benighted souls might enjoy, or at least find illuminating however much they hate them. So, I'm going to suggest a few boos that are less pissy, poisonous, pernicious, prickish, poorly written, prattish and pointless than Atlas Shrugged. Others are welcome to suggest a few as well. As Doctor Seuss used to say: "Try it, you might like it." At least it can't be more tiresome than six hundred pages of special pleading from a woman who had a chip on her shoulder because her daddy was chased out of Russia and couldn't own slavesserfs any more with all of that beastly collectivisation going on all over the place...
Unto This Last (John Ruskin)
A leftist essay about the sustainability of community, and the importance of the social contract, which is easily applicable to both leftist and rightist models. (In fact, the neocon massive's favourite British politician Tony "the chimp's poodle" Blair has frequently cited Ruskin's post Mills philosophy as an important component of New Labour, though he failed to explain how anything Ruskin said had any bearing on his decision to tighten monetarism's deadly grip on his country.)
Ruskin's argument is lengthy and heavily influenced by the Victorian arts and crafts movement, but it basically boils down to: the more people put into society and engage with their community, the better society and community work and the happier its members. This can, I admit, be a hard concept for the sort of libertarian who's only ever read Rand and Heinlein to get their head around.
Anno Dracula (Kim Newman) and Suckers (Ann Bilsson)
A brace of savage attacks on early '90s unregulated capitalism, disguised as vampire novels. While it's traditional to treat vampirism as a sexual metaphor, it works surprisingly well as a political metaphor. Of course, until the horror genre was recast in Stephen King's image as a parade of whining narcissists demanding that they deserve special treatment because they're better than everybody else, there used to be a strong social undercurrent to most horror fiction. Even a tale as crude as James Herbert's The Rats is as much about centuries of economic neglect of London's east end as monstrous rats eating children.
Capital aka Das Kapital (Karl Marx) and The Condition of the Working Class In England (Frederik Engels)
Given the number of righties on here who insist on describing anything and everything even slightly to the left of themselves as "Marxist" these books should be more widely read. Anybody who can wade through all three volumes of Capital (never mind The Communist Manifesto) and still describe teh Kenyan as a Marxist was probably dropped on their head as a baby...
White Lotus (John Hersey)
An example of a SF novel that's gained a new and terrible meaning through social change. Initially a pretty straight mapping of the black slave experience onto a white character (due to a future Chinese invasion enslaving the whole of the American population) in order to make points about the civil rights movement of the '60s and the evils of racism, it now worries the non Chinese reader for a variety of other reasons. I'd suggest any libertarians who feel that outsourcing manufacturing and dismantling domestic industry is a good idea because it concentrates wealth in the right hands should read this one, and think how their country will fare when the Chinese own everything and by extension everybody. (Jan Wong's China and Red China Blues are also highly relevant in this connection, and anybody who can read China Is Unhappy without stopping shopping at Walmart is made of sterner stuff than most...)
_____________________________
I like to think he was eaten by rats, in the dark, during a fog. It's what he would have wanted...
(Simon R Green on the late James Herbert)
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