We did it, the first meeting of 2025 in the bag and only eleven more to go. Thank you all so much for turning up, it was a great discussion.
Thanks to the power of people present, and managed democracy, we have chosen our books for February and April. The February book, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed is Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis.
If you want a copy of the February book or, any of the books for this year, please complete this form:
This will be the second time we’re reading Angela Y. Davis as a bookclub, the last one was back in March 2021 with Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.
There is no shortage of interviews and speeches by Angela Y. Davis and if you search some combination of her name and ‘prisons obsolete’ on popular video website you will get a wealth of good content. As such please see two good videos below but do find more.
Have a good day and I’ll see you on the 11th of February at 19:00 upstairs in Tiny Rebel.
Dear Readers, as you’re looking at this, on a cold, dark December night, I hope you are able to have a little bit of rest. In other words, I hope you are sitting comfortably, if so, we may begin.
Our book for January the 7th, 2025 and the start of this bold experiment for the bookclub, is the autobiographical Caliban Shrieks by Jack Hilton, originally published in 1935 and recently republished in 2024.
Jack was born in January, 1900 and thirty-five years later this would be the first of what would end up being five total books, as well as five-ish essays.
If you want a copy of the January book or, any of the books for this year, please complete this form:
The last book of those five books that Jack Hilton wrote was English Ribbon, published in 1950. Hilton lived another thirty-three years but did not write again, taking his own life aged eighty-three in 1983.
Most writings that I can find talk about Jack Hilton in relation to George Orwell and how Orwell was influenced by Jack, with their correspondence often being mentioned. There is a certain, unavoidable, dark commentary on the British class system in this, as it is depressingly unsurprising that the privileged Orwell ends up much more culturally present in his writings as an observer of poverty than someone who actually grew up and wrote from the 20th century working-class background.
Nevertheless, the book we do have now, in-front of us, is a testament to these writings having renewed staying power. The story of this republishing reminds us that there is no one definitive literary history or canon.
Each moment can, and should, involve choice when looking back on the past with those different, newer eyes, and deciding what we chose to treasure now, in this moment, not only what was considered sacred before.
Whether we are to see that more in this instance, well, as the write-up linked above notes, Jack Chadwick has the publishing rights and has been given the following mission:
“The proviso was, I do my utmost to breathe new life into Hilton’s accomplishments, all to the benefit of the Working Class Movement Library — a place where the legacies of unsung working-class talents are kept safe, safe from the narrow tastes that have so cleanly cut off generations of working-class people from literature and the arts.“
Additional Listening
Extracts from Original Reviews
“Books like this, which come from genuine workers and present a genuinely working-class outlook, are exceedingly rare and correspondingly important.”
Welcome to the Cardiff Left Bookclub, founded in 2019, we’re over five years old and finally have a plan for the entire year. There has never been a better time to read books fundamentally concerned with the world we live in and, over the course of 2025, we intend to do just that.
We usually meet upstairs at Tiny Rebel in Cardiff at 19:00 on the first Tuesday of each month, if there’s any change to that you will be the first to know.
2024 has seen instability in both the world and in the publishing industry, books have become much harder to get on short notice and our old model of, generally, having the books for the subsequent meetings voted on at the current one just isn’t sustainable.
This format also allows us to take a deeper dive on each book and a month before each book there will be supplemental reading/watching/listening sent out by mailing and posted on this site.
With consultation of existing bookclub members, and allowing for votes to still take place throughout the year, our list is the following:
January 14th – Caliban Shrieks by Jack Hilton February 11th – Book to be decided at the January meeting March 11th – How the Railways Will Fix the Future by Gareth Dennis April 8th – Book to be decided at the January meeting May 13th – A Woman’s Battles and Transformations by Édouard Louis June 10th – Brittle with Relics: A History of Wales by Richard King July 8th – Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks August 12th – Book to be decided at the July meeting September 9th – Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler October 14th – Book to be decided at the July meeting November 11th – Rose/House by Arkady Martine December 9th – The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens
Our key principles remain the same, we’re aiming for books that are easily readable in a month, with one long read a year, this year that long read is Brittle with Relics. The books that we read should be political, which, roughly, means those concerned with the world in which we live. We also should be reading at least one book about Wales a year, this is a minimum requirement and not a maximum given that all politics is, at the end of the day, local.
Finally, this isn’t a party political bookclub but it is one that believes, deeply, that unless spaces are actively made safe for people as a core principle, we are not fulfilling our basic human obligations.
Cardiff Left Bookclub 