In "They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us," author Peter Gelderloos argues that a failure to learn from, and remember, our history is a primary impediment to liberatory movements. "Many of us have come to expect that each new generation will grow up unaware of the struggles that preceded them, having to make all the same mistakes and to learn similar versions of the same lessons. But what if it doesn’t have to be that way?"
Radical history-keeping is one of the interventions that a bookspace like Firestorm participates in, and this year our community read a multitude of movement histories, revolutionary memoirs, and collected reflections. We didn't just read—past and present members of our collective also contributed to the work of documenting our shared experiences, as in "Books Through Bars" and "Constellations of Care," two new collections created by and for movement participants. In other cases, we gathered together with neighbors to read and discuss, a practice of collective digestion exemplified by the six weeks we spent with Solnit's "A Paradise Built In Hell" after Hurricane Helene (a backlist title that sold faster than we could replace it for months, resulting in widespread book sharing and the unmonetized circulation of photocopied chapters).
Of course, we were also reading novels! Despite some misconceptions, Firestorm is principally a collective of fiction readers, with tastes that skew toward the delightful and unsophisticated. And while our community sometimes surpasses us, we saw a continuing surge of interest in horror, with many of our best sellers bridging the terror of the supernatural and the horror of existing on the margins of capitalist and colonial states. Finally, we'd be remiss not to shout out Margaret Killjoy's "The Sapling Cage," a witchy YA novel that sold four times more copies than any title at our store, in a few short months becoming our second bestselling novel of all time 🤯
Find our complete list of 2024 Bestsellers & Collective Picks at
https://firestorm.coop/lists/2024-bestsellers-collective-picks.
Every year we produce a list of books that did particularly well at our co-op, or otherwise established themselves as collective favorites. If you haven't already, we hope you'll check out these standouts from 2024!
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Aguantemos 💪