Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer

pg 25 tiny, bombastic cock jerks himself off for having contradictory feelings about things and the wherewithal to know it. Achieves all over the anti-war movement.

A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré

Radical Chic by Tom Wolfe

While these people ARE ridiculous, the man to mock them is not one whose prose is thirty percent descriptions of suits.

Homo Zapiens by Victor Pelevin

Hey, what would you say are the odds that a guy like this who writes long psychedelic manifestos about marketing and technology, semi-disguised as narrative fiction, is a misogynist?

Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution by Julia Alekseyeva

Mostly non-ideological slice-of-life bio of a woman of the first generation of the Russian Revolution, who somehow lasted all the way to 2010. Told by her great-granddaughter, a Harvard PhD a year younger than me with health problems relating to Chernobyl. Lola, the great-grandmother, was born in 1910 to a Jewish Ukrainian family and survived the epicenter of probably the greatest bloodletting in human history (by volume, not proportion) as a young, spirited, indomitable communist. Book does a weird thing at the end connecting millennial socialism with Bolshevism, weird not because inappropriate but because it's just alluded to in like a single panel and then it's done. Unclear whether Lola's "a few bad apples spoiled it all" Khrushchevism is really Lola's or Julia's. Alekseyeva also treads lightly over her subject's time working as a secretary for the NKVD in the 1930s and 40s. But I like that it's a perspective from within that first revolutionary generation, which was by far the best (and is deliberately contrasted to the two later, intervening, fundamentally conservative ones), plus quotidian, loyalist life in the midst of now pretty mythologized mass violence. Wish she had talked more about the Party's draw to Jews stuck in profoundly antisemitic milieus. On the other hand, her disinclination to interrogate the whole Party thing much at all is part of the appeal.