Short and gripping. I've not read any of Miller's other works, but Galatea has tempted me to add them to my reading list. I thought that the narrative voice was very strong, so the reader was very connected to the protagonist despite the short length of the story and the fact that the format requires a fair amount of reading between the lines. The afterword is also well worth the read; I knew Pygmalion by name but not his story, so it was very valuable, and I loved how Miller reversed the namelessness in the original story in her adaptation.

Trying to read more theory so that I can argue more effectively with the people in my life. Writing that down makes me wonder if I’m a bit toxic, but if the end result is furthering my education it can’t really be all that bad, surely?

I read a bit of Lenin back when I was writing my essay on Babel, and I really liked his analysis of imperialism, though I didn’t read it cover to cover as I have with The State and Revolution.

While I managed to get through it in four days, it feels as though I have been reading it for the better part of a month. The writing is convoluted, repetitive, and filled with Lenin’s own personal grievances about other theorists that the modern reader will probably not have heard of. The final chapter - a complete debasement of the writings of said theorists - dragged on and didn’t really add much to the text, in my opinion, as Lenin’s criticisms were instead just corrections with what he had already relayed to us earlier in the pamphlet.

That being said, this was in some ways a lot more accessible that I expected. Lenin’s prose had more character than I thought going in, even if some of the idioms didn’t translate particularly well to English. Having read this I feel that I could much more clearly articulate what a communist society might look like, and distinguish between communism and other alternatives to capitalism (specifically socialism/lower communism and anarchism). I could quite easily summarise this book with a few sentences about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the smashing of the pre-existing state, but there were many ideas that I wish Lenin had explored more deeply. Some of his most absolute statements I found myself questioning because he didn’t fully elaborate on them; but I can also appreciate that the pamphlet was technically never finished due to the October Revolution.

I wouldn’t consider this book a very good way to ease yourself into Marxist thought, but it is nonetheless essential reading for anyone who wants to consider what the alternatives to our capitalist society might look like. It also does a fantastic job of making you consider how the concept of democracy - an almost universally revered concept in the West - might become obsolete as the state withers away; an initially obscene statement that makes more sense as you further understand Lenin’s argument.