READING

[allers]

What are you reading now?

I'm now re_reading "les mains sales" de sartre and i will try to translate the preface....
"you're proud over your purity ,my little guy ! see how you are afraid to get your hands dirty.Well,what is the use for it when you will come to us?
Purity? it is an oxymoron and monk's dream.You ,intellectuals,Bourgeois Anarchist
You are using it to do nothing.Do nothing and stay still,My Hands are dirty i plunged them into shit as well as in blood"



les mains sales de SARTRE

And you?

[Liberaregno]

at the moment i'm reading
the diary of anne frank (some extended edition)
the koran (in finnish, because i can't speak or read arabic, yet )
jennifer government, hehheh, in english

and after i get the diary or koran finished then i'm going to read muammar al-qadhafi's green book. it's too bad that you can't really get the book in finland or loan it from library so i guess i'm going to my school to print it out from the internet.

michelaccia, your book sounds interesting, what is it really about? can you describe it more?

[Anarchic Tribes]

Fiction: I've just (yes a minute ago) finished reading 'The Colour of Memory' by Geoff Dyer. It's about a group of friends living in brixton in 1989. It took me 3 months to read the first half and a week to read the rest. I liked the way it was written, it had 60 chapters staring with 060 and ending at 00. I guess I would say it was quite hard to get into but once I did it got better. 7/10 (I wouldn't want to read a book with a lower score than this.

Before that I read 'A Really Good School' by David Gribble. 7/10. I didn't like it at all, but read it in less than 3 days as it was hard to stop reading it. Perhaps my opinion was biased due to having met the guy at the bookfair last year (just didn't like him), which is annoying as he writes on a subject that I'm interested in. It was a horrible story though. This is a link to some words written by him:
www.redpepper.org.uk/natarch/xschool.html

The other book I read that week was 'Inspecting the Island' by Hylda Sims. "This is a powerful narrative of self-discovery, love and drama as well as an exploration of the lives of free children based on the author's experience as a pupil of A S Neill's Summerhill School." (It says on the back cover).
I give it 8/10. Would've been a 9 (probably for personal reasons as much as anything) but I didn't like the ending.

Non-fiction: 'Teach yourself Ethics' which has been humorous so far. 'ABC of Anarchism' which kind of goes "blah blah blah blah" and I find a bit boring (possibly because I'm not such a communist). 'Tomorrow's Biodiversity' by Vandana Shiva which I've only just started. 'the NO-NONSENSE guide to Globalization' by Wayne Ellwood which is written well enough to make the bed-time- reading list.

Added to that I'm using various horticulture and design books, and books related to edible landscaping.

And I'm supposed to be reading (for someone else) Jack Kerouac 'On the road' but it's a bit boring so far.

[workerscommunes]

Fictionwise I'm reading Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and 'The Trial' by Franz Kafka at the moment.

I'm also reading 'Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century' by Greil Marcus, which is sort of about the punk movement of the 70s but it's more interesting than that; drawing links with the situationists and all these other movements from history. Anyway here's the synopsis from amazon:

This title is about a single, serpentine fact: late in 1976 a record called "Anarchy in the UK" was issued in London, an event which launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. The song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris intellectuals. In Greil Marcus's classic book on punk, Dadaism, the situationists, medieval heretics and the Knights of the Round Table (amongst others), the greatest cultural critic of our times unravels the secret history of the 20th century.

[righteousnesous]

I'm reading reams of articles about my newest hero, Nehru. Its for an assignment on "Nehru's non alignment". Sure, he was a quite an orthodox socialist, and nothing like the primitivist-ness of Gandhi. But I love a man who applies his beliefs to life. Even though he accepted that should his idealism clash with India's national interest, the latter would have to prevail, he was a genuine true believer. Hence his spirit being crushed after the failure of his Asianism, following the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Anyway, prior to getting too busy, I was reading Bob McNammara's memoirs on the Vietnam War. Quite illuminating, at least to the point I got up to before I became too busy.

[Liberaregno]

Anarchic tribes, so if i understood correctly you're somewhat interested in these democratic schools? me too, i think i would love to be studying in one of those. what have you found out about them? what's your opinion?