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.