⭐ are excellent; 🎮 are visual novels or web novels; 📰 are articles or essays; 💬 are comics or graphic novels. Last updated mid-November.
Michael Moorcock - The Jewel in the Skull (1967): Fun and fast - Moorcock's imagination is infectious, even if his character writing (at least, here) is slight.
⭐ Porpentine Charity Heartscape - Serious Weakness (2023): Diary of a Wimpy Kid Autism Scale BL. Repressor failson(?) femboy x his nihilistic ex-school shooter abductor yaoi. So fucking good. Scenes of sexual violence that were incredibly written, literally nauseating, and somehow helped me understand my own completely consensual sexual experiences. Fujo ambrosia. Recommended if you can stomach it.
💬⭐ Yamashita Tomoko - Ikoku Nikki (2023): Navigating the unknowability of other people, particularly your family, particularly those that are no longer in your life, with a deftness that had me sobbing on my bathroom floor. Love love love.
⭐ Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives (1998): My first Bolaño. Made me yearn for the Artistic Life and Community even as it paints a decades-spanning tableau of practice and lives falling apart (and, occasionally, coming back together). Deeply sad and human. Still thinking about the last page.
Samuel Beckett - Watt (1953): Interesting formally, but not otherwise. Amounts to very little - unsurprising that Beckett himself thought poorly of this one.
⭐ Never Angeline North - Sea-Witch (2020): Deeply deeply affecting, particularly for where I was at when I read it. Layers of trans life at the margins, magic, love, and loss that dissolve allegory and memoir to a degree I found highly disorienting. Depressed me immensely for weeks, especially read back to back with ⬇️
Porpentine Charity Heartscape - Psycho Nymph Exile (2016): Agghhghhfhjfjjgjjgg. Bleak beyond measure and terrifying and affirming and anti-affirming. Pain pain pain. Very good.
🎮 imoteam - Hello Girl (2023): Sweet and wonderful. I would kill for Maillard.
unknown - The Gospel of Thomas
⭐ The Invisible Committee - The Coming Insurrection (2007): Valuable reference, and with Ashlar's essays below, prompted me to look at the city in a new light & with new analyses.
📰 A. G. Schwarz - Signals of Disorder: Sowing Anarchy in the Metropolis (2010)
📰 Wolfi Landstreischer - Against the Logic of Submission (2005)
📰 Rob Ashlar - Monotheism and Struggle: The Story of Iraqi Insurgency (2001-2004) (2024)
📰 Rob Ashlar - Black Banners on the Two Rivers: The Story of Iraqi Insurgency (2005) (2024)
D. W. Winicott - Playing and Reality (1971): Didn't really grab me, to be honest.
📰 Circles Editorial Team - Out of the Closet and Into the Streets (2023)
📰 Grace Lee Boggs - Organization Means Commitment (1972/2011)
📰 Jesse Cohn - Demodernizing Anarchism (2022)
Porpentine Charity Heartscape - Serious Weakness but with Girls (2023): Wow!!!
📰 Jay Fraser - The Transcendence of Death is Political (2021)
⭐ Phil Hine - Condensed Chaos (1995): As good as an introduction to chaos magic and magic in general, along with Liber Null, as I could've hoped for, while also (along with Liber Null) displaying many of the fixations and neuroses that keep me from a full-throated embrace of it. Still recommended!
⭐ Peter J. Carroll - Liber Null & Psychonaut (1987): (See above.)
⭐💬 Grant Morrison - The Invisibles (1993 - 1999): Brilliant and highly uneven. Morrison, idiosyncracies and all, makes me more of a believer with his fiction than any number of accounts of people's purportedly actual magickal experiences could. Truly visionary - albeit, dated, and less good with each volume - one to return to, for sure.
David Michael Cunningham - Creating Magickal Entities (2003): Good reference, though not a particularly interesting read. I have yet to try anything inside.
⭐ Anonymous - Ten Theses on Spiritual Anarchy: Beautiful. I want to print it out and stick it on my wall.
Various - The Boreal Crown and the Downfall of Civilization: Interesting enough.
Phil Baker - Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist (2010/2023): An engaging read and a good survey of a truly fascinating figure, but with a much more biographical focus than I was hoping for - much more time paid to Spare's life and the context surrounding his art than his ideas or the content of his work.
⭐📰 lolo - No Compromises: Inside The Minds of Today's Radicals (2024): ✊
Olga Tokarczuk - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009/2018): A good, mean, kind little book. Less of a mystery than it is a philosophical work - you can guess whodunit pretty quick just based on vibes, but the real attraction is the delving into the moral and psychological universe of our lead, which I found resonated with my own more and more every page.
Murray Bookchin - Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1995): Essential, even if maintain my usual gripes with Bookchin - the hardline opposition to spirituality and embrace of rationalism is understandable and justified, but I think he goes too far; similarly, the vitriol for primitivist and anti-civ prelapsarian ideas is earned, but sours for me in his attitude toward indigenous cultures and mores. I'm just more agreeable to anti-tech stances in 2024 than I think I would've been in 1995, and similarly less enamored of/hopeful about Pure Rationality paving our way out of capitalism on this side of scientism and New Atheism. That said, his takedown of lifestylism broadly and insistence on the need for mass organization instead of a retreat into egoism and individualistic, voluntaristic tendencies is, if anything, more salient than ever and pretty immensely clarifying.
Black Rose Anarchist Federation - Turning the Tide: An Anarchist Program for Popular Power (2023)