📚 My Top 10 Reads from Prison

You get plenty of time to read in prison. So far, I’ve read almost 70 books, so being asked to choose my top ten titles for The Rebel Library is tough. Those I’ve chosen have stayed with me not just because they’re “a good read” but because they’re the most impactful and important: books that hit me in the gut, opened up new understandings, and helped shape a vision for what the hell we do next. Our job is to take these beautiful pieces and turn them into a living whole — a culture, a strategy, a programme that breaks through. The future ahead is terrifying. And yet, in some head-fuck way, that very terror makes the possibility of a breakthrough feel electric.

So here goes...

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1. Iain McGilchrist – The Matter with Things 

Let’s start with the foundations - the ground-we-stand-on stuff. No question: one of the most important books I’ve read in prison is McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things.

McGilchrist gets the gravity of our situation. He’s laser-focused on the core wisdoms we need: seeing the whole not just the parts; recognising that everything is process and flow; and that the divine and secular, spirit and material, aren’t enemies but complements. He builds from science out into religion and mysticism, shattering the notion that modern science and ancient spirituality are in conflict. They aren’t. We need both to survive.

Although the book is lengthy and expensive, it effectively reiterates the same key points repeatedly. It could be criticised for repetition, but I think that’s one of its strengths. It serves as a deep sourcebook for its arguments, and there’s something almost meditative about absorbing these orientations over and over, not least because this process effectively counteracts the endless repetition of the neoliberal cultural indoctrinations that are taking us towards universal destruction

2. John Milbank – Theology and Social Theory

This foundational text challenges the arrogance of secular reason and reclaims theology as a serious intellectual tradition—one capable of reimagining society and putting the sacred back at the heart of political and cultural life. I’d even go as far as to say this is one of the top ten most important works of the past half century. That said, it’s not an easy read. Much of it went over my head the first time, and without Google (especially in prison), you're left wrestling with the complexity. But maybe that’s the point—if we’re going to face the extreme challenges of our time, it’s no surprise we need to question the very foundations of our cultural assumptions.

At the risk of oversimplifying, Milbank argues that secular reason—materialism, instrumentalism, reductionism—has led us into cultures of violence and nihilism, as the horrors of the past two centuries show. He masterfully dismantles the myth of “objective” social science, and exposes the failure of postmodernism to offer a real ethical grounding. Despite its rejection of absolute truths, postmodernism too often collapses into a Nietzschean nihilism—where might is right and everything is subjective.

In contrast, Milbank proposes an “ontology of peace” rooted in a reimagined Christianity. Unlike secular ideologies, which tend to produce conflict, this vision is grounded in forgiveness, charity, and love for the other. It’s not about abandoning reason, but about recognising other, deeper ways of being and knowing. These transcendent modes—faith, intuition, ritual, love—are, I believe, essential to any serious revolutionary project in the 21st century.

3. Zygmunt Bauman – Modernity and the Holocaust

Bauman is one of the greats — a Polish-Jewish socialist and towering sociologist who ended up in the UK after the war. His work rips apart the smug objectivity of social science, which pretends morality is just a social construct and socialisation is always good. In reality, as Bauman shows, socialisation created the Holocaust.

In Nazi Germany, it was conformity that allowed genocide — not a lack of it. Morality didn’t come from society, it came from within individuals who refused to go along with it. Bauman zeroes in on “proximity” — the distance from the suffering of others that enables barbarism. It hit me hard because my own research at King's College London focused on the same thing, completely independently.

Proximity breaks down dehumanisation. Disconnection allows it to flourish. We need social designs that build closeness, community, and care. Bauman saw that modernity — with its complexity and instrumental rationality — was leading us to disaster. We see it now as the death project of global carbon emissions.

4. Sarah Shortall – Soldiers of God in a Secular War

It’s not exactly a fashionable title, but it’s one of the most important books I’ve read. So important, I read it twice in prison.

It’s a deep dive into how 20th-century Catholic thinkers responded to the Church being booted out of state power in the late 1800s. That crisis forced a radical return to early Christian traditions — ones that refused the idea of religion being pushed into the private, symbolic, or subjective.

The core message? If God is God, then God has to be everywhere — including politics. The world can and must be remade with the divine present in every moment. The challenge is how to make that real. Catholic social movements made a decent go of it, creating a “personalist” alternative to fascism and Marxism, though not without complications. Still, the impulse to re-enchant the world with the wonders of spirituality— that’s where it’s at.

5. Matthew Beaumont – Lev Shestov: Philosopher of the Sleepless Night

Now for something a bit more fun (in a Russian existentialist sort of way). Shestov is your go-to guy for destroying all illusions. He’s anti-necessity, anti-certainty, anti-bullshit — and Beaumont brings him alive beautifully.

Fleeing the Russian Revolution, Shestov ended up in interwar Paris, raging against science, reason, and the pretensions of philosophy. You can know nothing that matters. Words are a distraction. Anything can happen. He’s the dark prophet of unpredictability, showing why neoliberalism — with its fantasies of objectivity, control, and progress — is completely deranged. Shestov knew it wouldn’t end well. And now here we are.

6. Theda Skocpol – States and Social Revolutions

This is the go-to academic take on how revolutions happen. Skocpol isn’t messing around. Her point: elites always screw things up eventually, and revolutions become inevitable. They’re not made, they come.

It's eerily prescient. Just like before the French Revolution, today’s ruling class is gutting the state — refusing to pay for it, grinding down its capacity. Sound familiar? Hello, Mr Trump.

7. Charles Kurzman – The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran

If Skocpol gives us the structural take, Kurzman gives us the chaos. His study of the 1979 Iranian Revolution shows how everything can change overnight.

Everyone thought the Shah’s regime was unshakable. But it fell like a house of cards. Mobilisation happened because mobilisation happened — a cascade, a feedback loop, with religious students kicking it off. They weren’t trying to win or avoid death — they acted from transcendental belief. And once the tipping point hit, the whole country joined in.

It’s a reminder: just because a regime looks stable doesn’t mean it is.

8. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira – Hospicing Modernity

This one packs a punch. Machado de Oliveira, coming from an indigenous Brazilian background and surviving a brutal early life, went on to become a top academic in Canada. Hospicing Modernity is a raw, original fusion of two worlds — and a brutal indictment of our dying culture.

The book challenges the entire structure of Western thought, including its radical wings. It forces us to confront grief, death, and the end of the world as we know it — not as metaphor, but as lived reality. It’s a painful but essential read. Machado de Oliveira is totally on the ball about the need for us to emotionally connect with our violence — both toward the earth and through neo-colonial practices and attitudes. The book is full of tough, often uncomfortable exercises in self-reflection. She also foregrounds the enormously powerful mythologies of indigenous wisdoms.

However, at the end of the day, she remains caught within what I call the constipation of academic postmodernism. She insists on plurality but cannot fully break through to the realities of the divine or the religious. There is virtually no discussion of the practicalities of revolutionary practice. Instead, she simply points out that being radical might get you into trouble (i.e., getting sacked — with the implicit ideological assumption that this will make you irrelevant).

And, last but not least, at the end of the book she makes a hopelessly depressing assertion: that the amazing practices and learning she has developed are not going to be rolled out — it’s just her and her small collective. So much for us being in an EMERGENCY.

There is great stuff here, which is why I’ve included it in my list — but it is, let’s put it this way, radically incomplete.

9. Daniel Coyle – The Culture Code

Let’s end with something practical. I read a bunch of books on deliberative democracy and citizens’ assemblies. Most of them were — let’s be honest — painfully dull. All stuck in the narrow worldview of academic political science: humans as little utility-maximising machines.

What actually matters — like how people come to love and trust each other through deliberation — is shoved into the footnotes. Seriously.

But then I found The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. What a joy. Straight-up insights into how teams work: people respond to encouragement and vulnerability; teams beat solo geniuses; leaders do best by being open and human. It’s all there — the culture we need to build revolutionary movements.

10. Andreas Malm – How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Then there’s Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline — a book so bad it has to be read. It’s a prime example of the logic of regressive, reductive male "activism". A bit of a mouthful, I know — but basically it embodies everything we’ve been moving away from since the founding of Extinction Rebellion.

The reason to read it isn’t so much to engage with its argument — that it would be good to start secretive sabotage — but rather to witness the deranged working-out of the worldview that thinkers like Milbank and McGilchrist so brilliantly expose. If we see the world as nothing but dead stuff — forces, materials, push and pull, struggle and overcoming — then we end up not only with the violence of capitalist extractivism, but also with the violence of Left fascism. Both grow from the same underlying brutalist materialism that cannot see beyond "stuff".

On a second reading, though, I felt more sad than mad about it. In a way, Malm seems to subliminally recognise the contradictions of what he’s proposing. He never really gets beyond academic critique and abstract rhetoric. Whenever he turns to real-world examples of sabotage, he can’t avoid the reality that they either achieve very little or, worse, spiral into political violence and civil war.

Your Turn

All the elements for a new civilisation are already here. The new is waiting to be born, but it’s weighed down by the dying old. Don’t we all feel it? So it's your turn to write the stories of the Revolution in the 21st century, because it's an incredible time to be alive. 

Get me out of prison, please — there’s so much to do.

4 DAYS TO GO!

On May 31, we’re hosting the next Rev21 Global Online Convention, and you should join.

It’s online, free, and spans almost every time zone. But more importantly, it’s a chance to meet the movement—not just the headline speakers like Matt Kennard, Rachel Donald, Tzeporah Berman, Peter Carter, Adam McKay, Dana R Fisher, and many more—but the thousands of people like you who are ready to walk their talk.

This isn’t just another conference. It’s a gathering of revolutionary minds, a space to connect, plan, and act—because we know that acting alone isn’t enough. We’ve tried that. It’s time to come together.