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Russian Communists, like Russian Tattoos and Russian Magazines, are Simply Better Than Ours

I've been meaning to write about 15 book reviews on here, mostly so I don't have to force people I know to listen to my opinions on books and people they couldn't possibly care less about. Less ambitiously, here is what I been reading:




The three Russian criminal tattoo books put out by Fuel. As I get older I am more and more inclined to buy books that are mostly pictures, and these are the perfect mix of scholarly introductions (not too long and never boring) and photographs about a world I'll never come anywhere near. This world is the antithesis of America's world of "body art", where every provincial has dozens of meaningless ugly tattoos all over themselves.




For some reason I think the KPRF and it's history are interesting. Maybe it's because American Communists are just so boring and awful, with a history of either being stooges or (after 1991)  generic lefties who think voting for Social Democratic parties is too extreme . I also suspect I am the only living person to have read Zhuganov's autobiography. This book explains how the KPRF became a hybrid of nationalism and Soviet nostalgia that only faded after the chaos of the Yeltsin years was well in the rearview.


Despite my Quebecois heritage, my French is not the best, so this is another book that is mostly just a series of pictures for me. I'm not sure if Paris Limonov is the best version of him or the least exciting. I've also been looking through the last Russian version of Esquire, which was also dedicated to Limonov. I cannot imagine even the most highbrow popular magazines in the U.S. focusing an entire issue on an author, at most you'd get a short review of the worst kind of fiction.

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