books_ergo_sum's Reviews (933)

A transcribed conversation between Piketty and Sandel (and at 128 pages long, actually brief). It was a good introduction to Piketty’s ideas. Sandel asked good questions and contributed ideas of his own.

Not detailed enough to get a five stars from me. But it’s a good place to start if you want to dip your toe into Piketty without committing yourself to one of his longer works.

No one is investigating inequality like this guy. For two reasons:
✨ his work is extremely data driven
✨ he includes all the factors that my little feminist, Marxist, anti-colonial, environmentalist heart could ever want

I think his method is just: if R2 is greater than 0.6, it gets included. The result is tons of graphs and investigations into tax policy, electoral laws, constitutional history, and wealth distribution… but also unpaid domestic labour, the gender pay gap, climate change, global inequality, and imperialism.

…. makes his books hella long, tho. “Brief History” is a bit of a misnomer. The audiobook is still 9 hours. Which is brief-er than his other 1,100 pages / 49 hour audiobook book. But yeah.

This one got four stars from me because I’m still a bit weirded out by his optimistic tone. On the one hand, he’s right—he so thoroughly demystifies inequality that I get why he thinks we can easily tackle it (on a theoretical level). But on the other hand, equality isn’t just going to fall from the sky and I wish his political analysis was a bit sharper.

But if you want a book that bypasses the pessimism and gets straight to solutions (and you like graphs)—Piketty is your guy.

There is a major ‘did this man have a time machine??’ element to this 1967 work of French philosophy. Because when he argues that late stage capitalism is turning us into the society of the spectacle, aka “a social relation among people, mediated by images”

Umm, yeah. Can confirm.

He doesn’t just predict things like instagram. He predicts a lot of the very specific features of instagram that we’re struggling to put words to, like:
▪️ the shift from consumption to the appearance of consumption
▪️ how instagram doesn’t just connect consumers to products but *creates* consumers for products 
▪️ even the interaction between totalitarianism and social media, aka social media as “the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself; its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life.”

So why the three stars? Put very simply: Debord neglects his Hegel. He posits a dualism between “the real” and “the image” (Hegel has specific critiques for all types of ontological dualisms, including this one). And if a philosopher tries to posit a dualism, straight to the trash 🗑️

Especially if said philosopher tries to critique Hegel as “teleological”—a misreading I’m tired of.

I like my ancient Mediterranean history with a side of upending Eurocentrism.

This book starts in 2000 BCE (so like, four thousand years ago; as far from the fall of the Roman Empire as we are now in 2025 CE) but this book DOES NOT—
▪️ try to root “civilization” (aka Europe) in the Bronze Age, Ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire.

Instead, our author begins with a critique of “civilizational thinking” as stemming from the height of European colonialism. And emphasizes what we can learn about ancient history when we remove this anachronistic colonial mindset.

It was cool. And I’d say its target audience is someone who is curious about ancient pottery, textiles, languages, early alphabets, ancient religions, etc—but avoids ancient history nonfiction because it can be too… “Roman salute” adjacent—if you know what I mean 🙄

Another fun one. Here’s my hypothesis about this series’ secret sauce (one ingredient is way more unhinged than the other 😆)—

Ingredient 1 (not so unhinged): clueless alien virgins who are so filled with yearning that their eyes literally glow = instant happiness. Try to be sad while reading about these dumb-dumbs being all cute and adorably down bad. It’s impossible.

Ingredient 2 (unhinged): aren’t we all dreaming about opting out of global capitalism? When our girl Jaya crash lands onto an alien penal cowboy planet with a strong sense of community, low cost of living, where no one is alienated from their labour?? Heck yeah, she wants to stay. And I want to live vicariously thought her haha

Add in likable characters, short and punchy plotlines, and lots of mistranslation-themed Dad jokes—and the book is just fun, dang it.

17 chapters, 17 contradictions of capitalism that are currently eating it (and us) alive.

… how to explain why I loved this so much?

I think it’s not a coincidence that my two favourite contemporary anti-capitalist thinkers (Kohei Saito and David Harvey) don’t just study Marx, they study the unfinished and fragmented third volume of Capital by Marx, specifically. 

And they also update Marx to cover climate change, imperialism, and unpaid women’s labour.

This is just the best kind of Marxism. It doesn’t limit itself, like most other Marxists, to only focusing on production à la Capital Vol. One by Marx (1,000+ pages)—Harvey also includes distribution and financialization à la Capital Vol. Two (600+ pages) and Vol. Three (1,000+ pages).

[I’m resisting going on a tangent about how Marx’s three volumes can’t be read separately because, like a Hegelian dialectic or Kant’s three critiques, they mediate each other…. I’m trying not to be so long-winded, trying to grow 😅]

Harvey just gets it. It makes sense that he famously predicted the 2008 financial crisis. And this book, even though it’s 11 years old now, has aged like fine wine. Because he knows what’s up.

Is this book dense as heck? Yes. But the 17 contradictions, 17 chapters set up was also really approachable.

It’s a one-stop shop for every conceivable problem with, and Achilles’ heel of, modern capitalism. What’s not to love??

Super enjoyable. But the slow burn might’ve flown a bit too close to the sun with this one.

This book had:

✨ yearning and pining to the absolute max

✨ a marriage of convenience with the hint of ‘gender swapped’ alien culture that makes this series so great

✨ she ~does~ get chased

✨ the SLOWEST of slow burns

This book is 450 pages of pure forced proximity slow burn.

• Was the yearning squeezing my heart to bits? Yes.

• Was there major on-page falling and romance plot pay-off? 💯

• Did almost nothing else happen (besides pining) for the bulk of the book? Yeahh. And that’s why this book went from a five star to a four star, for me.

Also, points for such a uniquely characterized FMC. Because she genuinely thought she was a witch. And she didn’t let waking up on an alien planet stop her. She made potions from alien planet herbs she knew nothing about and imbued objects with full moon rays from lunar cycles in another galaxy.

I mean, delulu is the selulu and I appreciated her commitment to the bit 😆

✨ the stabbiest of all stabby heroines
✨ WEIRD
✨ monstrous hero
✨ monster hunter heroine 

This was more horror than hot. And more wtf than swoon. This book had me genuinely afraid—in a skin-crawling way—of water. Not deep water. Like, the rain and little waves rolling in at the beach 😳

As someone who reads neither dark romance nor horror (so the following thought is really just a hunch)—this book felt more like a spicy horror-light romance than like a dark or monster romance. Where “spicy” means they bang a lot but in a “bizarre, weird, and kinda horrifying” way.

Because, as cool as our hero was, this story really centred our heroine (and I feel like dark romance implies at least an equal focus on the swoony love interest). This was all about her dark quest, the pathos of her ‘high plains drifter’ (Wales, edition) existence, and what it meant for her to align with one monster to fight other monsters.

I loved the body horror, I loved the pathos. And there was something extra dark about a stabby (quite murderous, tbh) heroine who used to be an EMT. It was like, murder—but make it medically accurate. 

Also, the spice in here was weird… but I feel like it’ll be even weirder in book two. I’m ready 😆

A love square, meddling faeries, and a play within a play. Did these parts of the story hang together particularly well? Not really. Were they all pretty funny? Sure.

I think A Midsummer Night’s Dream is better as an irl play than a book (though listening to a full-cast audiobook while following along with my eyeballs was pretty good).

And, justice for Helena.

So. Stubborn. I love to see a starchy stick-in-the-mud bodyguard crack. And he did—but we time jumped over some of it and were ‘told’ about it after the fact. Boo.

[read in chronological order (book 1, 4, 5, 7, 2, 3...) not publication order]