This is a frankly awesome critique of the (mid-90s) left’s ’master’ narritive of totalised global capitalism. The books central insights are gleaned from feminism and are all about the possibility of imagining non-capitalist economies and acknowledging that those economies actually exist alongside and inside global capitalism. Like a sort of Judith Butler for Marxian political economists.

I’m not much acquainted with the nexus of architecture, radical politics and critical theory, so I thought this’d be worth a punt. And it was. Its a look at what the Situationists were saying about architecture and urbanism, not just in the late fifties, but when they’d developed their more thoroughgoing critique of life as it is practiced in late capitalism. Its done mostly through original documents with some accompanying analysis. Passionate calls for the city to become a place fit for thrilling ludic adventures rather than just a site of consumption and regualtion.

The awesome Vim text editor is one of the main tools I use at work (and for home coding projects). I find the quality of Packt publications a bit variable. But this is a goodun. Schultz takes you through a bunch of cookbook-style recipes, from tweaks and hints to basic scripting.

A heartwrenching novel about a 17 year old who ends up in a coma and wakes up 17 years later. Coupland (he of GenX fame) writes beautiful prose. A massive contrast to Proust, he’s concerned with the empty centre of postmodern life.

I found this in Oxfam, man! Awesome exposition of the functional programming techniques available in perl. As it turns out perl ne c and mjd show us some of the lispish-ness inherent in perl. You can read Higher Order Perl for free online.

I am planning on finishing the final volume of Proust’s monumentally verbose six part novel by the end of 2011. Fantastic, insightful, but heavy going. Someone more obsessive than me has made a Reading Proust website.