Welcome to the Essence of Water Book Club! The four contributors to the website – Mark, Matt, Vero, and Peter – are joined by Molly Peterson, a journalist and reporter in southern California who shares our love of debate and inquiry. We started the book club during the boring days of lockdown in 2020, reading a short (roughly 100 page) work for discussion every two weeks; as of August 2021, we’ve switched to an every three week pace as Vero starts a full time PhD program and the rest of us look to a more normalised work schedule, but we’ve agreed to allow slightly longer works – nothing in the Das Kapital or Sources of the Self range, but not just limited to essays and lectures either.
On this page, we’ll keep everyone updated on what we’re reading – most recent work first. No links, just references – we know we have lots of readers in different locations, and not everyone’s favourite online bookshop works everywhere. But assuming you’re not behind a Communist internet wall, you should be able to find these works for purchase or download. Enjoy, and feel free to read along with us. And if you have an idea for something we should read, email me at:
admin@theessenceofwater.com
If we choose your book, we’ll invite you to the discussion session for it. Give it a try!
For the list, if the work is in italics, it’s a book. If the work is in “quotations”, it’s an essay or lecture which can be found in a book or online in PDF form. We also list the date the piece was written, which we’ve found to be helpful. Happy reading:
- March 30, 2022: Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer, 1983.
- March 9, 2022: Lost in Thought, Zena Hitz, 2020.
- February 9, 2022: The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan, 1967.
- January 19, 2022: The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, 1964.
- December 29, 2021: A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, 1928.
- December 6, 2021: Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Franco Berardi, 2015.
- November 17, 2021: Hooked, Rita Felski, 2017.
- October 27, 2021: The Three Ecologies, Felix Guattari, 1989 (trans. 2000).
- October 6, 2021: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Gustav le Bon, 1895.
- September 15, 2021: Philosophy as Poetry, Richard Rorty, 2016.
- August 25, 2021: Epistemic Injustic, Miranda Fricker, 2007.
- August 2, 2021: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Mark Fisher, 2009.
- July 20, 2021: The Scent of Time, Byung-Chul Han, 2009 (translation 2017).
- July 5, 2021 (we’re going to be on a summer schedule here): The Clock of the Long Now, Stuart Brand, 1999
- June 15, 2021: The Metabolic Museum, Clementine Deliss, 2021
- June 1, 2021: “The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability”, Sunny Taylor, 2004; “Human Personality”, Simone Weil, 1943; “Factory Work”, Simone Weil, 1943; “In Praise of Idleness”, Bertrand Russell, 1932
- May 19, 2021: “Letter to My Son”, Te-Nahesi Coates, 2016; “Race, Culture, and Identity”, Anthony Kwame Appiah, 1994; “My Dungeon Shook”, James Baldwin, 1956
- May 4, 2021: The Transparent Society, Gianni Vattimo, 1992
- April 20, 2021: “What is it like to be a bat,” Thomas Nagel, 1974
- April 6, 2021: “Leonardo: A memoir of his childhood,” Sigmund Freud, 1910
- March 23, 2021: The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch, 1970
- March 9, 2021: The Book, Alan Watts, 1989
- February 23, 2021: “Politics as Vocation” or “Politics as Work,” Max Weber, 1919 (this week was delayed due to weather in Texas)
- February 2, 2021: Fellow Creatures, Christine Korsgaard, 2020
- January 19, 2021: On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry, 2001
- January 5, 2021: The Book of Tea, Okakura Kakuzo, 1906
- December 22, 2020: Homo Interpretans, Johann Michel, English translation 2019
- December 4, 2020: The Gift, Marcel Mauss, 1950, various translations
- November 20, 2020: “On Signs and the Categories” from letters to Lady Welby, Charles Sanders Peirce, 1906-1908
- November 6, 2020: Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman, 1976
- October 23, 2020: “Technology of the Self” and interview, “On the Genealogy of Ethics”, Michel Foucault, early 1980s
- October 9, 2020: Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag, 2003
- September 25, 2020: “Pragmatism”, from lectures, William James, 1907
- September 9, 2020: On Liberty, John Stuart Mill, 1859
- August 26, 2020: Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Mikhail Bakhtin, English translation 1990
- August 14: 2020: “Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism”, Max Horkheimer, 1938
- July 29, 2020: I and Thou, Martin Buber, 1920
- July 15, 2020: “The Value of Voluntary Simplicity”, Richard Gregg, pamphlet, 1933
- July 1, 2020: Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm, 1941
- June 17, 2020: “Schopenhauer as Educator”, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1873
- June 3, 2020: The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir, 1949
- May 20, 2020: Chapter Five from The Republic, Plato, a long time ago
- May 6, 2020: “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, Isaiah Berlin, 1953
We started the Book Club with the naive hope that eventually we’d all gather in person and catch up over good food and wine and in a place with a great museum, but so far, we’re still waiting. Once we do, we may do a podcast or something to give everyone a flavour of the conversation. But in the interim, we’ll update the list each time we choose a new book. Please join in the journey.