Okay, so, I know it's technically October now, but I'm still gonna publish this under September. Also, I'm going to be cutting down my monthly reading lists to 8 books maximum, since this is the second month where I have not finished the list. I will be making an October updates post either tomorrow or Wednesday.
This book was major tonal whiplash after finishing I'm Glad My Mom Died, going from the very plain, straightforward language to the flowery wordiness of a 1902 'pamphlet' honestly made it hard to engage with the book at first. While I'm sure the book was written in relatively plain language for its time, the translation I was able to get was not written in plain language.
I feel as though my lack of history knowledge surrounding Russia after about 1700 being non-existent puts me at a great disadvantage of being able to absorb the text in its full context, I'm hoping my later reading will help me to fill in the gaps. A lot of what Lenin discusses I have no direct knowledge of, and it is a highly contextual text, where the context is important for understanding the nuances of the arguments being made, though I think I got the gist of it.
I had seen a meme recently saying that What is to be Done? is the equivalent of a Marxist self-help book, I would say that is an apt comparison. I will probably come back to this book after I have gained a bit more context, which I think will help my understanding of the text, but as of right now, my main takeaways from the book are
1. Lenin is a sassy bitch
2. Communication, secrecy, and political alignment are very necessary tools for a revolution
All in all, would I recommend this book? It depends on your prior knowledge of communist and socialist theory and of Russian history, if you know more than me, then yeah, I'd probably recommend it.