— Andre Dubus, “After Twenty Years”

“The point from which politics starts for me is hunger. Nothing less.”

— John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel

“A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when [Simone Weil] heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the  revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“No, no, I do not feel sorry for those who die of hunger. What I feel is rage.”

— Clarice Lispector, “Dies Irae”

“You and your friends fill your mouths with big words–Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution–and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don’t feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables, and a good fish broth at least once a week. I’m only interested in the kinds of revolution that start off by getting people sat at the table.”

—  José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion

“There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.”

these images of sandra oh in the 90's/early 00's live in my mind rent free

“Those in power keep invoking “the normal” as in “when we get back to normal.” I’ve developed an aversion to that word normal. Of course, I understand the more benign meanings of normal; having dinner with friends, going to the movies, going back to work (not so benign). However, I have never used it with any confidence in the first place; now, I find it noxious. The repetition of “when things return to normal” as if that normal, was not in contention. Was the violence against women normal? Was the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism normal? Was white supremacy normal? Was the homelessness growing on the streets normal? Were homophobia and transphobia normal? Were pervasive surveillance and policing of Black and Indigenous and people of colour normal? Yes, I suppose all of that was normal. But, I and many other people hate that normal. Who would one have to be to sit in that normal restfully, to mourn it, or to desire its continuance? We are, in fact, still in that awful normal that is narrativized as minor injustices, or social ills that would get better if some of us waited, if we had the patience to bear it, if we had noticed and were grateful for the miniscule “progress” etc … Well, yes, this normal, this usual, this ease was predicated on dis-ease. The dis-ease was always presented as something to be solved in the future, but for certain exigences of budget, but for planning, but for the faults of “those” people, their lack of responsibility, but for all that, there were plans to remedy it, in some future time. We were to hold onto that hope and the suspension of disbelief it required to maintain “normal.”

Literally every single humanities/social science teacher or professor I’ve ever had has books that are covered with sticky tabs and notes in all the margins. Books are meant to be enjoyed. You make a book yours by covering it with your thoughts.

That’s just a part of reading. I don’t know why there’s this aversion to enjoying them but like… books are t decorative. Who are you “preserving” them for by not leaving marks on them?

check local libraries for “free books” racks. a lot of public libraries, including those at public universities, will have carts and boxes of free books when they take them out of circulation or they’re outdated (especially for textbooks where new editions are being released). this is especially good if you’re trying to get into specific academic subjects–the Sociology department at my university, for instance, has it’s own library and professors will donate extra copies of books they have, and they’re always free. everyone has a right to be on public university grounds because it’s public.

thrift stores. you might not be able to find new / current books all the time, but different thrift shops will have books. 

thriftbooks.com is fairly straightforward. they sell all kinds of books at reasonable prices. while new books cannot be shipped outside of the US, they ship virtually everywhere. they have a selection over over 14.8 million books, and their inventory is changing all the time.

Gish Jen just published a science/dystopian/political fiction novel called The Resisters on Feb 4 2020. You can buy it brand new for $23. 

Just Mercy, a memoir from civil rights activist and law professor Bryan Stevenson, has been on the NY Bestsellers list for 23 weeks.Brand new paperback? $15. Hardcover? $24.

You can search books by language, including Spanish, Korean, Hebrew, and a dozen others.

AbeBooks.com specializes in used and rare books, including collectibles, and similar to Thrift Books they have classics like Night and Jane Austen for $5. They’re also great for textbooks, though they may be older editions.

Other sites: Book Outlet, Alibris (which boasts having prices as low as $0.99).

book giveaways. Goodreads is fairly well-known and they do giveaways, but you can also look at publishing house websites as they tend to have “first look” giveaways where you can read an excerpt, do a mini-review, or otherwise enter a raffle to win free copies of books. Sometimes libraries have these too, especially when authors are visiting.