2022 has been an exciting year for Little Read Books. After a turbulent but rewarding 2021, we started the year with a new radical speculative/science fiction reading group and have since established a fairly regular schedule of organizing at least two reading groups and one film screening every month, open to all in the community.
Some titles we have covered together this year are
Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? and "Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation"
Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" and The Dispossessed
Mao Zedong's seminal Five Essays on Philosophy and "Combat Liberalism"
"Peace Utopias" by Rosa Luxemburg
A New Outlook on Health by the Advocators
Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki
Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad
The Hologram Handbook by pirate.care
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The documentaries Dope is Death, Harlan County, USA, How Yukong Moved the Mountains, and Santa Army 1975 (on December 17th! Join us at GLOB!)
and the films Salt of the Earth, Man with a Movie Camera,Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Soy Cuba, Love & Anarchy, Born in Flames
Some recent reading group titles: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Washington Bullets, Terminal Boredom
If that seems like a lot of programming for one year, it was! We are proud to have established a consistent schedule of open, peer-led political education for all who are interested in learning more about socialism, anarchism, philosophy, alternative futures, the revolutionary power of film, and much more. A few highlights from the year were our thoughtful discussion of Capitalist Realism; our May Day double feature at the Aztlan, attended by dozens of community members; our screening of Dope is Death accompanied by a Narcan and harm reduction training, which was our first event at GLOB; and our discussion on A New Outlook On Health, also at GLOB, which explored the deep harms caused by the privatization of healthcare in the United States. The marquee of the Aztlan Theater ahead of our May Day double feature of Salt of the Earth and Harlan County, USA.
We also organize a monthly gathering where our volunteers and friends (and kind strangers) write letters and/or fulfill book requests sent to us by people incarcerated in facilities across the US, many of whom otherwise would not have access to reading material. Through this we have exchanged contact with imprisoned revolutionaries and dozens of working class people suffering behind bars, many of whom have shared tales of unfair trials and subsequent treatment landing them behind bars. We are delighted to regularly receive requests for political education materials from our contacts on the inside and do our best to provide everyone who writes to us with the books they request.
A flyer for our February 2022 prisoner letter writing session, featuring stamps from Salvador Allende's Chile.
As of now, we have around 15 regular members that are involved in the long-term planning of Little Read Books, as well as 50+ familiar faces that attend our events as they are able/interested. We have a monthly meeting where we decide what work is to be done, and how to split it up. Meetings are run horizontally and with rotating facilitators, so everyone in attendance has a voice in the decision making process.
Our delightful volunteers passing out literature outside the Aztlan, First Friday of December 2022.
A tough but necessary decision we collectively made in the second half of this year was to halt our weekly free book/food/harm reduction stand at Grant & Colfax. Due to the City of Denver's fascistic, racist, and genocidal sweeps and constant dispersal and harassment of our unhoused community making this location no longer relevant for much of our audience, and generally far lower traffic at our usual free book stand location downtown, we have decided to indefinitely halt our free book stand while we reorient our efforts around strengthening our organizational structure and community education work and scope out other prospects for materially supporting our unhoused neighbors and friends. On the other hand, we have started up a monthly stand at Santa Fe Drive’s First Friday, outside the lovely Aztlan Theater, where we have connected with many people interested in learning about socialism and revolutionary politics.
An exciting possibility that is in the works for us is the opportunity to move into a local DIY music/art space called GLOB (and out of our storage unit). In doing so, we will have access to a space to host all sorts of events that otherwise would not be possible if we were just meeting in coffee shops. Free, non-commercial, and anti-profit spaces in Denver for people to gather and discuss revolutionary ideas are few and far between; we look forward to activating this space in new and unusual ways, offering our educational resources and books to a wider audience, and making and strengthening connections between the arts and revolutionary politics, concepts, and analysis.
The wonderful crowd at our discussion of A New Outlook on Health by the Advocators, dissecting the effects of privatization of healthcare in the USA.
At the end of the day, Little Read Books is an organization committed to building relationships with our neighbors and comrades and asking what it really means to take care of one another and gain skills to transform our world. In an alienated and atomized culture, we are proud to be a space for connection and peer-driven, community-based political education and literary discussion. We are tremendously grateful for your continued support!
A small selection of our delightful Lending Library!
For those receiving this message who are no longer donating monthly or gave a one-time donation, we humbly ask that you consider a small monthly (tax deductible) donation to LRB - our budget is 100% transparent via our OpenCollective profile and $0 goes to paying extravagant salaries to nonprofit execs. Our entire budget goes towards paying our operating expenses including rent, ordering revolutionary political literature to distribute and discuss in our community, sending mail and packages of books out to our incarcerated comrades, and other day to day costs of operating a horizontal, volunteer-run, anti-profit and anti-commercial peer-led political education project in our community.
The flyer for our combination Narcan training / screening of Dope is Death, April 2022.
Other than a donation, there are several ways you can help us raise funds:
With the holiday shopping season approaching, one way to support our work is by buying books from our store at Bookshop.org/shop/LittleReadBooks. In addition to keeping money away from Amazon, 30% of your purchase will go directly to our organization. Our shop has plenty of book suggestions from our brilliant volunteers if you’re not sure what to buy ;)
Same deal goes for audiobooks, you can support us by using the linklibro.fm/LittleReadBooks for your audiobook purchases/subscription rather than giving money to Audible (owned by Amazon). You can also get free ebooks and audiobooks through your local public library, so cancel that Audible subscription no matter what!
Please share these links with your book and audiobook loving friends, lovers, and comrades!
Our volunteers outside the Aztlan on First Friday, summer 2022.
With love and in deep gratitude and solidarity,
¡Hasta la Victoria, Siempre!
The Little Read Books Crew
Working and Living in the Occupied Indigenous Territory of the Apache, Ute, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Arapaho Nations
