My Christmas reading. I've been meaning to read more about Babeuf for decades, as I have a memory of him being one the revolutionary that appealed most to me, a proto-socialist concerned with equality and common ownership rather than the bourgeois concerns of most of the progenitors of the French Revolution. There's not much on him in english it would appear, and I'm not sure I know much more after reading this, which was far to heavy on the marxist theorising for me. ' The Liquid Land' was very good, set in a forgotten village in Austria ruled by an eccentric Countess and built on top of a giant hole which isn't really discussed. it's an allegory of the holocaust being swept under the carpet with the hole as the elephant in the room which is ignored while everything is swept into it. What brought me to it was the idea of an Tyrolean equivalent of Rotherweird or Lud-In-the Mist, and I got that - slightly less faerie and a lot more sachertorte, but still. 'In America' is another book made for me, and I've put more by Geert Mak on my wishlist already (I'm sure I have read a book by him on Amsterdam though). A european intellectual follows Steinbeck round America, partly to check in the veracity of Steinbeck's reportage (conclusion - it was largely invention and fiction, which is fine, this is Steinbeck) and partly to chronicle the changes since 1960, which he does brilliantly. Of course, I now want to undergo exactly the same roadtrip, ideally with a dog and in an RV. one day. . .
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