• The map woman - surrealist and beautiful commentary upon home, belonging, and self development.
• Work - a clear and heartbreaking depiction of the physical and mental labour women do to keep society running, it can also be read as the increasing and thoughtless burden of humanity upon mother nature. 
• Loud -  carried a really important message on how women have to shout to be heard and the pure rage we have at the systemic violence inflicted upon us disproportionately. (Especially through global war, note the Afghanistan 2001 sentence at the start and the descriptions of violence towards the end).
• Gambler - I personally identified, because I do this too!

"The structure of the collection is very clever, starting with the typically 'Angry, Hurt Feminist' poems which we all associate with Duffy, and ending with much more sentimental, personal and arguably unsettling poems. Individually, the poems are nice and present a clear political and personal message, if a little simple. It's a very nice and easy poetry book to read with some clear and important messages throughout."

The conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote that 'one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. ' But if everyone has an ecological education, we will not live alone, and it will not be a world of wounds.”

• Regenesis - George Monbiot (2022)
• The Red Deal: Indigenous action to save our earth - The Red Nation (2021)
• Life on our planet - David Attenborough (2020)
• The hidden life of trees - Peter Wohlleben (2015)
• Entangled life - Merlin Sheldrake (2020)
• The garden jungle - Dave Goulson (2019)

"We've become trapped by our own observations, we forget that in a world completely transformed by man that what we're looking at is not necessarily the environment wildlife prefer, but the depleted remnants that wildlife is having to cope with. What is has it not necessarily what it wants. Species may be surviving at the very limits of their range, clinging on in conditions that don't really suit them. Open up the box, allow natural processes to develop, give species a wider scope to express themselves and you get a very different picture."

"We have become a nation obsessed with ordliness and boundaries."

"[NIMBYs], dislike mess, say they love nature but don't feel it should look like that. "It feels like a foreign land, it looks abandoned".  

"Though we protest that we love nature, is seems that this is only on our own terms. We have become a nation of gardeners, more interested in exotic flowers than natives."

"Once again predjuice and alarm outpace science."

"Lack of unfamiliarity breeds unbridled fears"

"Lack of empathy and knowledge of nature seems to be at the route of much of this behaviour"

"How many trees flowers birds and insects can an average person identify today?"

• I love the content of the essay. I'll summarise some standout aspects here:
• Dean describes the variance in political work, this is inspiring 
• Dean argues for 'The Party', to create a sense of belonging and accountability to each other. This challenges ideas of hierarchy and dominance perpetuated by capitlaism.
• Dean has an interesting critique of Allyship, I enjoyed most of it, only disagreed with a couple of points
• Dean focuses on communicative capitalism (the author's own coining) 
• Interesting illustation and commentary of 'the comrade' using 'Prochies' from Platanov's Chevengur. 
• I greatly enjoyed the commentary on discipline and organisation
• Dean gave good insights into the factionalism and apathy within the left (pages 100-101 were poignant)
• Dean highlights the importance of unifying theory and practice 
• I loved the natural queer theory inclusion of 'the comrade'. The term is distinct from citizen (state relationship) or familial terms (blood and inheritance relationships). Comradery can provide intimacy in a different way.
•  I particularly enjoyed the chapter on comrades' four primary characteristics: discipline, joy, enthusiasm, and courage. 
• A difficult, but ultimately incredibly important, explanation of why comrade can and must be based on sameness and equality (not on equity, as focussed on in most intersectional feminist politics). This was difficult for me to understand at first, but ultimately I was convinced by the argument. The historical examples given from the CPUSA on their approach to anti-racism was what swung it for me. I would gladly join a party with such a clear and strong stance on anti-racist action in practice. 

• Inacessible language and analyses to anyone not well-read in leftist literature. Even a glossary of terms would greatly help widen this up to people. e.g., most people don't understand the difference between democratic socialist and communist and most aren't well read in the Russian revolution factions beyond the Bolsheviks. 
• Even for those well read, the style is unecessarily academic in my opinion. I was finding myself getting bored and having to re-read a sentence or paragraph a few times. For a short book, it felt long. Usually, the same information was summarised more clearly only a page or so afterwards. It could have benefitted from a more rutherless editor. 
• Attempts to be global, but is largely US-centric. This is acknowledged by the author, and not necessarily a probem. I would just like to see wider inclusion. There are many examples of 'the comrade' in the global south, and I don't see global north authors discussing them. This is disappointing and missing an opportunity to build global solidarity. 

"Ally appears to designate a limit, suggesting that you will never be one of us, than it does to enable solidarity". (Solidarity that is required for a revolutionary left to succeed) - parantheses my own

"We need to learn, or relearn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital's work for it by condemning and abusing each other" - Mark Fisher

"Comrade does not eliminate difference. It provides a container indifferent to its contents".

 "Comrades put individual identity aside as they work together for justice. Collective desire replaces the fiction that desire can be individual... this doesn't mean that comrades don't recognize how ascribed identities are vehicles for oppesions and discrimination... rather comradeship is a politcal relation not determined or beholden to these identities."

"Comrade entails taking a side, rather than refusing to acknowledge and avow the existence of sides".

"[The term] Comrades let one forget the status that the world gives them - birth, family, name, class."

"Comradeship is a necessary condition for communism: the collective of those who enjoy each other refuse to let property take their place."

"Comrade designates a relation, not an individual identity". 

"Comrades are not simply those who believe in a truth - for example as in, for example the idea of communism. Their fidelity to a certain truth is manifested in practical work"

"Anyone can be a comrade, but not everyone. And, there is a space of non-belonging. That you are not my comrade does not mean that you are  necessarily my enemy. You may be a bystander, comeone politically disengaged, an ally with interests of your own that temporarily overlap with mine, someone who might later come to be a comrade."

"Comrades are multiple, replaceable, fungible. They are elements in collectives, even collections."

"The working class demonstrates through proletarian discipline, that capitalists and landlords are superfluous. We don't need them."

"Revolutionary discipline depends on political conciousness - on an understanding of why order must be obeyed" - George Orwell

"Comradely courage includes the capacity for self criticism, the capacity to admit to being wrong or not knowing and then correct any errors through further study and work."

1. Stories which paint a portrait of individuals who suddenly find themselves alone and afraid in an unfamiliar or threatening world
2. Stories that examines the fragility and antifragility of relationships, which keep people strong and sane under pressure, but which can also imperil them in times of crisis
3. Stories which anatomise the manias of people in a state of quiet desperation, painting portraits of minds that have slipped into in a state of mania, and teaching us that anger is a momentary madness, as are fear and anxiety

 "When life was dull, any element added seemed unnaturally intriguing." - excerpt from Long distance call

 "Death is a fascinating lure to men who can stand aside and watch it operate on someone else." - excerpt from The conqueror

 "He was the one. How could he have failed to know it? His fear, his dread, his hatred. His fear if also being scrapped, replaced; his dread if being shut out from the things he loved and needed; he hatred of a world that had no use for aged things."  - excerpt from Shock wave

"It is not practical for most of us to get rid of labels entirely but we must also not attribute too much power or elegance to them."

"The bisexual activist Robyn Ochs defines bisexuality as "the potential to be attracted—romantically and/or sexually—to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree."

Valuing honesty impacts bisexuals differently to straight or gay people. Where all might uphold honesty as a family value only bisexuals grapple with how living day to day in a monogamous relationship might be interpreted as deceitful unless they disclose their bisexuality to others.

"The reason the alliance between bi and trans people is so natural is because both represent a fluidity and destruction of binaries that make people uncomfortable."

Three factors impacting mental health of bisexual people:
1) Double discrimination (monosexism from queer and hetero communities)
2) Isolation from queer community 
3) Internal biphobia