#utopian book

[hvacinth]

books i've read in 2024: Titan by Mado Nozaki

You don’t have to keep working if you don’t want to… You have the right to choose how you live your life.

[lunarpunkwitch]

Just received a book I’ve been looking forward to buying for a few months! I gave it a quick flip through but I’m excited to give it a more in-depth read once I get the chance :)

I’ve been feeling more iffy about using ‘Magick’ instead of ‘magic’, but considering how many books use the K version in the witchcraft space I’m unsurprised this book uses it as well. I’ll give it a full review once I read through it.

[thegodwhocums]

I want to know more about this book before buying a copy and my library doesn't have it

anybody checked it out? it is a recent release so there are few reviews (and you can't trust Goodreads on witchcraft books)

[rachel-sylvan-author]

"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

Thank you @book.lady.life for the rec! ❤️

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

@moms4liberty is what happens when a customer complaint makes a wish upon a burning cross to become a political movement and starts wanting to speak with all the managers.

[The Daily Don]

* * * *

"Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise - the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence.

Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer."  

- Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

[thanks to whiskey river]

[july-19th-club]

tanaaj is such a tragic character "i do everything right nobody has ever been as good or correct about the rule of saint leah as i am. unrelated but why do i feel so bad and guilty and lonely all the time?" well for starters you live in fully automated luxury catholicism so that's gonna contribute to the issue for sure

[yellow-yarrow]

The cosmism research is still ongoing, btw I think it would be kinda funny if elysium lore was based on cosmism but without the space element lol. Its like if you had christianity without a god. Oh wait right..

[nightpool]

thinking a lot about Perhaps The Stars and its depiction of war today. i feel like she really nailed that one. still not sure how i feel about the ending / overall arc of the back half of the book but the horrors of war really were truly there

[kafkasapartment]

The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence

― “Steve Jobs” biography by Walter Isaacson.

[bea-lele-carmen]

[jojotier]

Please God dpes ANYONE know of any examples of books about utopias that aren't A Dystopia Pretending To Be A Utopia. Like true utopia as the setting. Every person I ask cant think of a Single One

[abookisafriend]

the fifth sacred thing, by starhawk: four and a half out of five honeybees

i've been looking forward to this book for a long time. it's a classic of utopian literature…and dystopian literature. can a pacifist society survive contact with a militarized society…and keep its soul intact?

the first third or so of the book establishes the community around which the book is based. an egalitarian commune has grown out of the rubble of post-apocalyptic san francisco, and they face all the challenges of life plus the dread of what could happen when the replacement for the old u.s. government comes knocking to "claim" its old territory. that government is an amalgam of corporate rule, military domination, and pseudoreligious oppression that controls every aspect of life, down to the water.

the book was written in 1993, and -- except for the frequent mentions of the ozone layer, which we were actually able to fix, it seems prescient. early reviewers called the mixture of fascism and pseudochristianity an "overused SF bugbear" (thanks wikipedia), but it's exactly what we're facing today. the question of whether we can survive peacefully -- whether we can transform the virulent enemy culture before it kills us or makes us monsters ourselves -- is the central question of the novel.

the portrayal of fascist rule is brutal. nothing is held back. this is not a novel for people who have ptsd flashbacks.

at the same time, the portrayal of mundo bueno -- the good world -- is so lavish and loving that it's worth reading the first third of the book just to see starhawk's vision of what is possible. witness the streets with clean fishing streams running beside them, the avenues lined with sweet fruit trees and verdant gardens. witness the love and freedom possible with a community of lovers. that's a major aspect of the book: it's an advertisement for the future. the future we can win if we set down divisions and power struggles of "race," gender, and class…a shamelessly queer and polyamorous future, i might add, and a future in which all ancestries and cultures are celebrated in a kind of joyful melange anchored in respect for the four sacred things, which cannot be owned or stolen -- earth, air, water, and fire -- and the most subtle of all, the fifth sacred thing, spirit.

it's a novel full of magic and miracles, but the thesis of the novel doesn't depend on anything supernatural: it just depends on the question of whether humanity can be awakened even in those in whom it has been deliberately crushed to make them subservient tools of a killing machine. what it really comes down to is the conscience of the universal soldier.

i'm going to end the review with this video, in the spirit of starhawk's call to compassion. what if they gave a war and, finally, nobody came? all told, a fantastic effort; a classic: five out of five honeybees

[caffeinated-bibliophile]

Some of ya'll weren't around for the booklr hate campaigns of the 2010s.

And I'm happy for you.

Like, genuinely, if you missed that shit, I'm so glad. It was horrible and depressing and frustrating and we lost some great people because a few loud and semi-popular people aimed their 4chan-wanna-be followers at the bloggers they disliked (often anyone who had a different opinion or tried to facilitate deeper discussions than "ew this classic has racism so mark twain is canceled and you're going to hell if you read his books!" and such, and usually it was people who never even interacted with the ring leaders).

It was gross, and I know at least one of those hateful people took their superiority complex and vitriol to other platforms and continued to play at being the real victim any time someone called out their behavior, until like 2 years ago when they were driven away from those spaces as well.

Some of you were here, some of you were targets, and if you see this post and it brings back bad memories, I'm so sorry.

But I've seen several posts recently that were romanticizing the booklr of yesteryear and I want any newer folks to know that, yes, booklr was more active in the early 2010s. It was also not a peaceful place.

I think one of the reasons for the lack of interactions now might be because those of us who've been here for over a decade might remember the way posts were hijacked and ask boxes filled with hate and threats of doxxing over the most asinine, inconsequential thing.

The bookish community is not insulated from or immune to toxic fandom bullshit, and the blow the community took in the 2010s is something we're really only just starting to recover from and begin rebuilding.

[parsleysagerosemarytimemachine]

'Locklands' was an interesting conclusion to this fantasy trilogy, but also just not a heist novel in the same way the first two were - this is more of a thriller about magical transhumanism and family trauma, which is fun, but also I was hoping for it to somehow give us 'one last big score' in a way that this didn't. (Also, I was kind of disappointed in the epilogue, in the way that is more about my problems with failures of transhumanism than anything to do with fantasy or heists…) Anway, really can't recommend starting here because so much of this is about wrapping up plots and paying off revelations from the earlier books, but if you like fantasy heists, 'logical' and interlocking magics, or canonical lesbians going through it, 'Foundryside' is a good book, and it'll get you here eventually. :)

[miraclemaya]

what is it about ttrpgs with tactical combat having the most obnoxious fans

[strikeslip]

listening to the Terra Ignota graphicaudio cast recordings and I just want you all to know that Casamir Perry is so cringe that I had to pause and go listen to an entire unrelated 1.5hr documentary when I hit his first scene with Ando and Ganymede