They Thought They Were Free: The Germans by Milton Mayer

The book is an account of interviews with rank-and-file Nazi party members from interviews done by a Jewish journalist (he did not disclose his ethnicity/faith). It’s an interesting ground level view into Germany’s descent into fascist rule and genocide. It contained some surprises for me as someone who’s been brought up with a view of the Nazi Party as pure, unadulterated evil. It was obviously evil in so many ways, but it also helped care for its members in a way that the establishment politicians had failed at. There were a lot of parallels with the present day that I felt were informative.

Edit: The reason why I think it’s important to have a clear view of the Nazi Party (or any political movement) is that when we view movements as only caricatures then we can miss a descent into evil. After all, look at all the good that X group is doing! They make sure everyone is fed and housed. You’re just biased, always complaining about how they keep locking up their critics and oppressing minority groups.

• Armor by John Steakley
• UBIK by Phil Dick
• New Sun by Gene Wolfe
• Crecy by Michael Livingston
• Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

• The WInd-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
• Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman
• The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane
• The Trial by Franz Kafka

• Penguin Island, by Anatole France : A parody of the history of western civilization.
• Ten Days That Shook The World, by John Reed : First hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution.
• Dracula, by Bram Stoker
• Lauren Ipsum, by Carlos Bueno : Children’s book about logic and computers.

The Neverending story by Michael Ende the Scar by China Mieville

Fiction

• The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke
• Diaspora by Greg Egan
• Blindsight by Peter Watts
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
• Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
• Children of Time Adrian by Tchaikovsky
• All Systems Red
• Inverted Frontier by Linda Nagata
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang
• A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
• Doors of Sleep by Tim Pratt
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Non Fiction

• Das Kapital by Karl Marx
• The State and Revolution by V. I. Lenin
• The Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti
• Democracy for the Few by Michael Parenti
• On Practice and Contradiction by Mao Zedong
• Why Marx was Right by Terry Eagleton

Boulevard by Jim Grimsley

All the Tales of the City books by Armistead Maupin

Anything Agatha Christie. (except Big Four, it’s awful)

You can find them all in library genesis.

All time favorite is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but I mostly read nonfiction…

• The Odyssey by Homer
• Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Black Book by Giovanni Papini

I love Dakota Krout’s work in general. The Disgardium series by Dan Sugralinov is one of my favorites. A recent nonfiction work I read was Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman that I thoroughly enjoyed and still have in my library for looking back on later. He Who Fights With Monsters is also a series I follow religiously.

Nice ones! I’m recently reading the trilogy by R.E.McDermott. First book is Under a Telltale Sky. Worth it!