I have 2. The People’s Republic of Walmart is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I’m a little familiar with central planning techniques… but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just “Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it’s possible” without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning… I just didn’t get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize.
And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn’t even finish Bullshit Jobs. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn’t a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.
I think it’s more a very specific style they each have, which some people find very cold, but which I find chillingly analytical and insightful in both. I don’t know what Fanon reads like in English but in French he’s definitely considered to have a powerful style. A great example of his text being used in English is in the documentary Concerning Violence. Big recommend but also CW for violence.