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Winter 2025 Reading

'tis the low page-count season

Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God

By: Joseph Daher

  •     This book I purchased off the shelf entirely due to it’s title, and it certainly makes the guys in the break room stop trying to make small-talk when they see it. This is one I cannot recommend to anyone, but if you have a fascination with Middle Eastern politics and unemployment statistics feel free to ignore me. There’s definitely real information here about Iranian funding schemes, privatization battles over telecommunication infrastructure, IMF loans and things of that nature, but this is meant for someone with more background knowledge than I. The book is focused on a very recent period of time, with the early days of Hezbollah and the Lebanese Civil war covered briefly and without significant detail.

  •     The main thesis of the book is reiterated often: However religious and theocratic a party may be, they quickly hit the hard ground of political reality and have to start focusing on cutting real estate deals. This mode of operation should dispel (poly-sci degree holders? news-watchers? me, the guy reading this book? from) the idea of there being forces at play that are beyond the scope of ‘regular’ political analysis. The beliefs of the fundamentalist should not be doubled in the mind of the observer, when you trace out the economic details all the way down to small-ball financial incentives for construction developers, or even to benefits for the families of martyrs, you see the extremely rational behaviors of a political machine, same as any other.

  •     I did find it odd and hard to grasp the sort of state-within-a-state structure that Hezbollah seems to occupy within Lebanon. They are allowed to control their own standing army, their own infrastructure, and run parallel social programs. The latter is something that is seen more often but the first two boggle my western mind. Even more interesting was the Hezbollah style costco card, it doesn’t explicitly denote party membership of the holder or the accepting business, but can be presented at sympathetic Shia owned businesses for a potential discount.

Foma Gordeyev

By: Maxim Gorky

  •     My copy has a dramatic scowling man looking back over his shoulder. Sadly the binding on this over 80 year old copy is giving out. I’ve done what I can with some sort of acid free archival tape of uncertain provenance. I find myself in this situation far too often, I’m always charmed by the editions that are falling apart at the seams. Should anyone reading this have some book repair for dummies advice please reach out.

  •     The story of a successful merchant’s loser son. Foma Gordeyev wanders around the Volga spending his deceased father’s money and asking ‘what’s the meaning of it all’ until he ends up at the all-merchants riverboat party, where he promptly snaps and goes around screaming at everyone that they’re pedophiles, they’re ruining the country, and perhaps most importantly, they’re being annoyingly self-congratulatory. For his troubles Foma is jumped by the entirety of Russia’s newly established upper crust, and marched straight off the steam engine into the nearest asylum.

  •     Beautiful Stuff. I will never get tired to reading Russian literature. Gorky is rather clear in his political leanings, with scenes of the protagonist becoming insufferably aware of his class position, and even as a child finds a perverse thrill in being able to rat out his father’s workers after overhearing them gripe about working conditions. This book doesn’t hit the level of morality tale narrative that Mother does (no slander intended against Mother, my cynicism is no match in the face of the fictional serf book-smugglers), and the main character isn’t behaving quite so much like a cartoon villain for the full span of the book. Instead, the bulk of the run-time is this young man wondering what he’s meant to be doing, with his time, with his money, with his status and getting advice that he hates hearing.

  • “‘Are you going to bed?’ asked Foma as he gave her hand a tight squeeze.

  • ‘I’ll read a bit first.’

  • ‘Books are to you what vodka is to a drunk,’ he said disapprovingly.

  • ‘Can you suggest anything better?’“

Society Of The Spectacle + Simulacra and Simulation

By: Guy Deboard + Jean Badrillard

  •     I’m sure that I’m doing some sort of disservice to these by lumping them together, but even though I read them one after another, they appear to be the exact same book. I’m probably the last guy on earth to have not watched the Matrix, but from what I’ve heard you can probably just get away with watching the movie instead of reading the books. Hyperreality, spectacle production, reproduction of the image, however you like to refer to it, we are undoubtedly living in this world now. Nobody is capable of dealing with the infinite media mill individually, and nobody can put forward a reasonable way to slow or reverse it on a societal level. Anyone with a fragment of humanity left in their body will intuitively grasp the theses of these books the first time they catch an older relative blaring AI generated vertical content out of their phone speaker.

  •     Personally I have nothing but endless frustration with the types of works that can be described as: french, post-modernist(philosophical post-modernism, not literary post-modernism (although both heavily revolve around being mad at the TV) which I tend to enjoy), critical-theory, etc. I have seen too many people get limited print runs with indie publishers by playing extremely fast and loose with the definition of ‘alienation’ and by my assessment, that phenomenon is all down-stream of these works. The only work in this vein that I was pretty amenable towards while reading was Bataille’s The Accursed Share. This might just come down to him being less of a ‘household name’. I was more willing to engage with his impractical economic framework as a pure thought-exercise rather than as something real people believe in. That sort of grace I do not extend to the practicing foucauldian monks that hang around the public parks asking me for spare change.

  •     “Animals have thus preceded us on the path of liberal extermination. All the aspects of the modern treatment of animals, retrace the vicissitudes of the manipulation of humans, from experimentation to industial pressure in breeding.”

Libra

By: Don DeLillo

  •     Personally I’m a guy who likes a good conspiracy theory, but I haven’t ever paid much attention to any of the JFK expanded universe. That stuff is for an older crowd, and my own exposure is primarily though Dale Gribble best of supercuts that someone put into the King of The Hill torrents. This isn’t as much fun as White Noise and Mao II, but Lee Harvey being portrayed as some sort of holy fool who accidentally talks himself into being mis-handled by federales definitely has it’s moments. The most memorable parts of the book are from the secondary characters, Oswald’s mother who is cut in at various points always speaking as if she’s in the middle of giving a practiced testimony. The sleazy strip club owner who closes his club out of respect for the fallen president, and thanking God that this Oswald wasn’t a fellow Jew. The KGB agent, who is the only person in the story to immediately catch on to the fact that he was interrogating a moron.

  •     Unfortunately Oswald and his better half are less interesting as subjects, but then, is JFK an interesting subject in this book? Does he need to be? It’s the act itself that’s larger than the people involved. I wont say this one should be skipped , but if you haven’t read any of DeLillo’s works maybe start elsewhere.

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise

By: Georges Perec

  •     An extremely fun short book, I gave a copy to my boss at his retirement party and it got a nice giggle to break the awkwardness surrounding a corporate cake-cutting. I thought that the structure felt very familiar to Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and was surprised to learn they were both part of the Oulipo writing group. Since there’s not a lot of book here I won’t try to reveal too much, but I liked it enough to blindly buy the next Perec book I found on sale. If you’re moved by this review, consider reading the text first before the translator’s forward, interesting as it was I felt like it also slightly spoiled some of the fun of the book.

∵ Redrick Schuhart ∴ 2026-03-14