Not until I retired after 35+ years in my field did I realize what a. great boon it had been to be an academic who literally got paid to read books.
Now, as I think about what we are facing as a nation, I think about the books that I hope people might get the chance to read and ponder ... in a world that increasingly has no time for that kind of non-productive behavior.
Almost equally importantly, I think of books that you can either get for free, or for dirt cheap, without having to send money to Jeff Bezos and Amazon.
WHERE TO GET THESE BOOKS (with a couple minor exceptions)
Every one of these books (unless otherwise noted individually) is available both at Anna's Archive and Abe Books.
Anna's Archive is a free digital library that describes itself thus:
The largest truly open library in human history. ⭐️ We mirror Sci-Hub and LibGen. We scrape and open-source Z-Lib, DuXiu, and more. 📈 42,295,586 books, 13,266,182 papers — preserved forever. All our code and data are completely open source.
It's true -- this is the worthy successor to LibGen and far superior to the Internet Archive (though you can still find odd things there that you can find nowhere else). If you don't buy a membership you have to use the "slow downloads" sources, but honestly I download more books than you ever will (trust me) and I work around the slow downloads on background browsing.
Sometimes you will get a bad file -- shit happens. But mostly (especially in pdf and epub) you're golden.
There is of course the question of whether you had deep feelings of depriving authors of royalties by grabbing what are essentially bootleg copies of their work. As an author with fourteen books up on Anna's Archive, I personally am just happy that people continue to look for, download, and hopefully read my stuff. Trust me -- particularly in a hard copy, you're not depriving the author of much. But if that is an issue ...
... use Abe Books instead. A-B-E (advanced book exchange) is a marketplace for hundreds if not thousands of booksellers worldwide. You can find almost anything, and usually at a phenomenally good price (or at least a fair price). You are ordering through Abe Books to the individual bookseller, but the cool part is that if there is a problem, it's Abe Books that returns your money, and they go get satisfaction from the sellers. Since the sellers don't want that to happen, they are very accommodating.
I have probably ordered more than 200 books this way over the years, and had a significant problem with only one, which was ironed out in 48 hours to my complete satisfaction. If there is a refund to be made, you get it directly from Abe Books rather than having to wait on the individual seller.
THE BOOK CATEGORIES (for today):
I want to suggest books in three different categories today: (a) non-fiction regarding resistance to authoritarianism in America (to include considerations of violent resistance); (b) non-fiction regarding a variety of threats to American democracy in past days (that are not quite what you may think; and (c) relevant fiction about America and fascism
Resistance to fascism/authoritarianism
