Bedside Books - What I'm Reading: a response to @riverflows challenge

A response to @riverflows challenge about what books you're reading. Thanks to @revisesociology for bringing the contest to my attention in his show us your stack post. Here's my selection:

The Lost Get-Back Boogie - James Lee Burke

Image: The Lost Get-Back Boogie - Amazon.co.uk

I've just finished re-reading this. It's a story about redemption, someone who makes it and someone who doesn't. Like James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux books, it's violent, with an over emphasis on masculinity as a response the brutality of environments like the Angola Prison Farm.

A description of Angola opens the book, but I had forgotten the later scene where the convicts meet in the dining room, showered and cleaned up, and dance to home-made music. For all the violence, though, the story of Iry, the anti-hero, and Beth is tender and gentle, and filled with longing.

The story starts in Louisiana, but moves to Montana, and reading this book is when I first became aware of that landscape and its beauty and is perhaps why it has stayed in my memory.

Collaborative Leadership - David Archer and Alex Cameron

Image: Amazon.co.uk

I'm reading this for work, where I co-ordinate a consortium of twenty-nine organisations with annual incomes ranging from £100,000 to £13 million a year. After working together for about ten years, delivering services to survivors of sexual and domestic violence across London, members have decided to formally collaborate within a single legal entity.

The authors posit that successful collaboration depends on equal attention to governance, relationships and systems, in contrast to working in a team where relationships have greater importance or a customer/supplier relationship where governance (the contract) has priority. They acknowledge, and this is helpful, that conflict is an inherent part of collaborating and will need a fast response.

Collaboration is wonderfully messy and this book offers a simple model for navigating your way through the complexities without losing sight of them. It has some useful templates and practical suggestions for looking at how things are and reviewing how they change over time. I'm running a business planning session with members in a week or two and my opening presentation will use some of the ideas from this book.

Anthropology, Ecology and Anarchism - Brian Morris

Image: PM Press

I went to a public meeting of the newly formed Anarchist Communist Group in May where Brian Morris was the speaker. I made copious notes, intending to write a blog post, but couldn't make head nor tail of them when I came to read them, although I remember that Brian (and I'm sure my notes) made perfect sense at the time.

Brian, at 81, has been a lifelong thinker and writer and a passionate activist. His talk was choc-full of ideas about the relevance of anarchist ideas today, far too many for me to assimilate in one evening. Especially when he had a tantalising pile of books on the table with an interesting looking pamphlet about Bakunin on the top.

Anthropology, Ecology and Anarchism, a collection of Brian's essays, is my next port of call to try and makes some sense of my notes and the ramshackle set of ideas scurrying around my brain. So far, I've not found a copy in the university Library or Housman's bookshop, next to Kings Cross in Caledonian Road. If all else fails, I'll order a copy at Five Leaves - the only radical bookshop to open in the 21st century.

Should I be lucky enough to win some SBD, I will be donating it to Leicester #raceforlife which I shall be participating in on Sunday 8 July 2018.

Many thanks for the contest - great fun!