No worries!

I think if I was going to read manga digitally I’d be reaching for a tablet to do so because they can display colour and the screens are generally a lot bigger and can handle zooming if needed. Apparently the subreddit r/MangaPiracy has some good links but I haven’t looked into it because I’m not into manga. Obviously you can run a tablet as an e-reader too and the added screen size might be a benefit here.

I get what you mean about screen size being small.

I prefer larger text myself and that’s actually why I prefer e-readers (aside from the perks of piracy of course) because you are virtually unlimited in how large you can make the font size; since the screen is effectively limitless, you can either infinite-scroll as you read line by line or you can just tap ahead to the next page as needed.

Obviously different devices meet different needs.

If I was looking at reading PDFs and .cbz sorts of files, a tablet is absolutely the way to go.

If I wanted large print size then a phone is good and an e-reader is better but you’re limited to epub and mobi files (PDFs are possible on a phone but it’s generally a bit hard going to read an entire PDF of a book on a phone.)

If you want an all-arounder then you can’t go past a tablet though.

One of the dirty secrets of the tech industry is that tablets and e-readers really don’t need to be released on a schedule like iPhones do. If it’s just for displaying text or PDFs then you can grab last season’s model on clearance, a second hand device, or a brand new low-end device and it’ll work just fine for your purposes.

(I’d steer clear of Kindles tbh. They run surprisingly buggy software that struggles with producing text and you have to go through workarounds if you sideload most of your books so it’s much better to get something like a Kobo tbh.)

Books have got so expensive in the last couple of years.

If you want something physical to read in between being able to buy books, you could:

• get a PDF of the book the you’re planning to buy
• look at the references
• see what books in the bibliography/footnotes are available in the library.

Marxists often start their research by looking at bourgeois works. There’s little danger in borrowing a books by e.g. Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, Mill. These are dated examples, and can be more difficult than reading Marx, but it’s just to illustrate the idea.

Michael Hudson’s Marxist mentor, for example, told Hudson that he would mentor him if he read every source cited in Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value. (Maybe I’ve got the details slightly mixed up, but that’s the gist of how Hudson became such s good political economist.)

If you look at Parenti’s sources, he also frequently cites (more recent) bourgeois authors. It won’t hurt to read the kinds of texts that Marxists are engaging with. These might be in your library?

FA Hayek will give you a good insight into how neoliberals think, for example. I don’t think you’ll raise any eyebrows by borrowing that kind of book (except your own eyebrows).

Good on you for returning shit books! When I browse PDFs of books that I want to buy, I search for a few key terms. Stalin. Stalinism. Lenin. Marx. Engels. If the work claims to be radical but doesn’t mention any of them, I’m skeptical.

If it claims to be Marxist and includes 20 uses of ‘Stalinism’, all in a negative light, it’s going to wind me up. Plenty of mistakes were made in the USSR under Stalin, sure, but if a ‘Marxist’ can lump all these together under ‘Stalinism’, they lose a lot of my respect. It just tells me they’ve got a big box of themes/issues that they don’t want to think about too closely. So instead of thinking, they fill up the Stalinism box, close the lid, and pretend they made an argument.

Actually, thinking about it, a decent book about thinking is Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and other Tools for Thinking. The chapters are short. I can’t remember if it’s anti-communist because I read it before I was a Marxist. That said, if it is anti-communist, that can probably be overlooked because there’s still a lot of value in what he says. He’s a bourgeois popular philosopher, so his book might be in your library. Or they might get a copy in for you.

Dennett says, for example, that if an author uses ‘surely XYZ’ or ‘arguably XYZ’, it’s because they haven’t argued XYZ. If they haven’t made an argument about it, there may be a strong reason to doubt XYZ but the writer wants you to stop thinking about it and move on. I’ve found that ‘Stalinism’ is used in a similar way. It’s a thought-terminating label.

It’s not that I don’t read those books, but I won’t pay a lot for them. If you’re on a tight budget, you might want to figure out what annoys you, then you can look out for it in the PDF before you buy. You might also be surprised at how much you can learn just by skimming a PDF to see whether it’s the kind of book you want to read so much that you’re willing to buy a copy.

There is an open source, DIY e-ink reader that should be cheaper than a branded one if you’re willing to order the parts and build it. It won’t be tied in to any store, either. I’ll find a link for you.

Edit: here’s a link to the DIY ereader— https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2353783 or maybe !lemmygrad.ml/post/2353783 but it looks like it might still cost $85 in Euros and might not be as swish as a branded one.

If you want to look at a range of ‘history’ topics, History as Mystery is good.

Otherwise, my two favourites are Inventing Reality and Make Believe Media.

You can usually get reasonably priced copies of the Parenti books that he published with City Lights Books or The New Press. His other ones can be harder to find and can be expensive because they might be out of print so you can be looking at ‘collector item’ prices. Not always. But some are outrageous.

You could always find the PDFs just to have a look through, etc, before committing to a purchase. That’s what I do.

Does your library do inter-library loans? Sometimes there’s a small fee but it’s a lot cheaper than buying. Depends whether you want to keep it for reference. Just be careful what you order so you don’t end up on a watchlist. Or say that you’re researching 👻🎃 the crimes of the Soviets because you want to make your Halloween outfit authentic 🎃👻.

You’re probably okay unless you’re ordering one of the big names. I doubt most people would know or realise the significance of e.g. Frantz Fanon or David Harvey or Walter Rodney or, dare I say it, Naomi Klein. Marxists got quite good after McCarthyism at pretending they weren’t Marxists with their book titles.

Monthly Review does some good books in modern register.

So do Verso and Haymarket but they’re not exclusively Marxist or ML. I’ve been disappointed with a fair few books from Verso where the anti-Soviet messaging came through strong. Both of them reprint ‘classics’ and aren’t always clear that it’s a reprint.

Personally I appreciate them making some old books available again. This might annoy you if you buy something printed in ‘2019’ and find out it was written in 1919.

Good books you might find in your library are Natives by Akala (it’s about race in Britain), Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (I’ve not read it but I’ve had it recommended by comrades), Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm.

I realise you didn’t ask for all this, but thought it might be helpful as you seem to be struggling with a problem that I once faced.

Odd, whenever I check they’re the lowest prices, sometimes even lower than through regular search because of some affiliate coupon. Sometimes you have to try different author/title listings to find the “right” one. In any case, eBay and Amazon will get you pretty cheap most the time.

The Parenti books I’ve read and recommend are Blackshirts and Reds and Inventing Reality. Washington Bullets by Vijay Prishad is in a similar vein and also good.

Somewhat similar to Blackshirts and Reds, perhaps less polemic, Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins.

Mostly unrelated but also good and approachable is My Life by [someone who interviewed] Fidel Castro. A quasi autobiography by someone whose name escapes me at the moment. Pairs well with the Blowback season on Cuba.