I read the "The ministry of time" by Kaliane Bradley in a few nights, I simply couldn't put it down. A gripping story of time travel as much as a thoughtful reflection on structural power. I adored how she elegantly broaches the subjects of colonialism, racism and sexism simply through who her characters are. The structural power relations between them drive the story as much as the romantic angle (which was also very neatly done, btw).
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Interests: climate, science, sci-fi, fantasy, LGBTQIA+, history, anarchism, anti-racism, labor politics
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Emracool rated He Who Drowned the World: 4 stars

He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan
What would you give to win the world?
Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding high after her victory – …

Verena reviewed The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Sally Strange commented on The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd
Sally Strange wants to read Everyday Utopia by Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee
Sally Strange replied to Sally Strange's status
Content warning Possible spoilers, mostly my speculation
@n0madz@wzrds.fun So I'm a LITTLE further on now and it seems clear that there's something supernatural going on.
I had guessed and turned out to be correct that the Cartographers are Nell's father's friend group from college. I'm still fascinated, so that's good!
Sally Strange commented on The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd
At the beginning of the audiobook, there's an announcement that you can view the maps mentioned in the text by going to the author's page at the Harper Collins website, but the download doesn't seem to be working: www.harpercollins.com/pages/thecartographers
Fortunately, there's an e-book sample that let me view at least a small version of the NYS map.
Still, it would be cool to get a better look at it. Maybe I should email them.

One of the best non fiction of recent years
5 stars
( em português → sol2070.in/2025/02/livro-everyday-utopia-kristen-ghodsee/ )
In “Everyday Utopia” (2024, 352 pages), the north-american feminist anthropologist Kristen R. Ghodsee explores utopian ways of organizing family, relationships, and property in various intentional alternative communities, both historical and still existing today. Definitely one of the most interesting non-fiction books I’ve picked up in recent years.
The book analyzes everything from contemporary initiatives for shared housing and household items to reduce costs and foster support networks, to religious communities where everything is collective, as well as the political, cultural, and biological origins of both dominant and alternative family models, among many other topics.
For example, we commonly imagine the traditional family as something natural rather than as a structure with origins that are less biological and more cultural. The author discusses the Mosuo, a Tibetan community where authority is centered around grandmothers, and women own and inherit property through the maternal lineage. Relationships …
( em português → sol2070.in/2025/02/livro-everyday-utopia-kristen-ghodsee/ )
In “Everyday Utopia” (2024, 352 pages), the north-american feminist anthropologist Kristen R. Ghodsee explores utopian ways of organizing family, relationships, and property in various intentional alternative communities, both historical and still existing today. Definitely one of the most interesting non-fiction books I’ve picked up in recent years.
The book analyzes everything from contemporary initiatives for shared housing and household items to reduce costs and foster support networks, to religious communities where everything is collective, as well as the political, cultural, and biological origins of both dominant and alternative family models, among many other topics.
For example, we commonly imagine the traditional family as something natural rather than as a structure with origins that are less biological and more cultural. The author discusses the Mosuo, a Tibetan community where authority is centered around grandmothers, and women own and inherit property through the maternal lineage. Relationships are open and free for both parties. The concept of “father” barely exists. For men, who live in their grandmothers’ homes, being a good uncle is what truly matters, as they help raise their sisters’ children. Since there is no formal marriage, couples form solely based on attraction. When they separate, there are no negative consequences financially, socially, or for the children.
As Ghodsee states:
"How very radical the Mosuo family structure seems to many of us today highlights just how deeply ingrained our own patrilocal and patrilineal traditions remain."
Alternative ways of thinking about and organizing family and child-rearing are a central theme of the book, especially considering the oppressive and unjust burdens the current model places on mothers and women. The communal upbringing of children is a common feature among many of the communities analyzed, an idea that was even formulated as ideal by Plato 24 centuries ago.
One of the reasons the author became interested in this topic is that, coming from a Puerto Rican-Persian background, she experienced financial and family hardships during her childhood and adolescence. A teacher helped her as if she were family, even providing her with housing and sponsoring her college admission — an act to which she credits her entire career. Personal stories like this make the book even more compelling. For instance, she also shares the professional challenges she faced when she became a mother.
A frequently referenced book is “The Dawn of Everything”, in which David Graeber and David Wengrow attempt to retell the history of human societies, debunking myths about inequality and progress. One of their conclusions is that ancestral communities and societies were limited only by their creativity in exploring different ways of organizing themselves. There was equality, inequality, accumulation, sharing, agriculture interwoven with foraging, and so on. Similarly, we are not trapped in today’s inequality and oppression — these are not a “natural progression” but merely another human invention.
I felt “Everyday Utopia” was a rich sibling book to “The Dawn of Everything” because it is filled with practical examples of intentional innovation and improvement in the ways humans organize socially.
Excerpts Below is a selection of highlighted passages, culminating in a fascinating subchapter on why Martin Luther King Jr. loved the TV series Star Trek.
“…we must understand that this kind of utopian thinking provides an invaluable intellectual tool. Even if dreams don’t come true, they do expand our imagination of what is possible and thereby reshape the landscape of what we can practically achieve (the so-called Overton window).”
“‘Utopia’ derives from the Greek roots for “not” and “place,” which means that “Utopia” references a “no place” or nowhere, although it is also a homonym for the word “Eutopia,” which means “good place.” This ambiguity was intentional.”
“As the French economist Thomas Piketty explains, “Every human society must justify its inequalities: unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse.”
“… a general outline comes into view. Our ancestors were by no means always monogamous. Where monogamy did evolve, it may have done so for darker reasons than you’d expect. The nuclear family is not evolutionarily inevitable. Our contemporary mating practices are not “natural” or “unnatural,” “right” or “wrong.” Instead, the diversity, flexibility, and creativity around how we love, lust, marry, and raise our young has allowed humans to adapt and change over our evolutionary history. Family forms can respond to different demographic, environmental, or economic contexts, leading researchers on the evolution of human family forms to conclude that: “The cross-cultural empirical record supports that the family is a highly flexible social organization that is transiently, culturally and ecologically adaptable, a dynamic less transparent from traditional positions on patrilocality, patrilineality, and male parental care.”
“In a similar way to how we collectively believe in paper money, many of us also embrace the fiction that the way we organize our private lives is the only way available to us. Even if we understand in the abstract about the pressures parents face, the strain that child-rearing places on romantic relationships, the high divorce rate, the prevalence of child abuse and intimate partner violence, and the very real possibilities of our own or our partner’s long-term unemployment, disability, or death, we replicate the domestic form that makes us the most vulnerable to these problems because it is convenient and because that’s what everyone expects of us. Just as our entire economy rests on the fiction of what economists call a fiat currency, it also rests on a particular notion of the family, one that is often viewed as either natural or divinely mandated, but which acts to uphold a specific set of social and economic relations.”
Why Martin Luther King Jr. Loved Star Trek “I was born in 1970, a moment of sudden and unexpected challenges to the prevailing status quo. Wonder Woman’s creator introduced the Princess of Paradise Island during World War II, but it’s no coincidence that the image of the Amazon warrior also appeared on the very first issue of the explicitly feminist Ms. magazine in 1972 under the headline: “Wonder Woman for President.” Eleven years later, I watched my other screen heroine, forced to wear a now-iconic metal bikini, free herself from the tongue-waggling and blubbery Jabba the Hutt by strangling him with the very chain he had used to bind her to him. The University of Pennsylvania only fully integrated female undergraduate students into its School of Arts and Sciences in 1974, and yet today I teach there as a full professor and serve as the chair of my department. In some ways, both Wonder Woman and Princess Leia helped me to deal with the sexism I often encountered in my own life because I could imagine worlds where sexism didn’t hold women back. They were just fictional characters, but they made a difference. Although I am too young to have seen the original series while it was airing, another science fiction show has the distinction of being the longest lasting and most influential utopian vision that ever entered popular culture. When Star Trek began broadcasting in 1966, its creator, Gene Roddenberry, crafted a positive view of the future where humanity had overcome all of its conflicts and lived in a sort of galactic Pax Romana within something called the United Federation of Planets, “an interstellar union of different worlds and species with shared principles of universal liberty, rights, and equality.”44 In a 2011 interview, the late actress Nichelle Nichols (who played the African communications officer, Uhura, on the original starship Enterprise) recounted a story of her first meeting with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. at a banquet. King told Nichols that he was a huge fan of the show and that it was the only thing he and his wife allowed their children to stay up late to watch. At the time, Nichols intended to leave the show to pursue a career in the theater, but King insisted she had to stay. Nichols recalled: “He said I had the first nonstereotypical role, I had a role with honor, dignity and intelligence. He said, ‘You simply cannot abdicate, this is an important role. This is why we are marching. We never thought we’d see this on TV.’ ”45 For the first generation of Black Trekkies, Nichols’s portrayal as an officer on the bridge of the interracial starship Enterprise helped them envision the possibility of equality. “When I was a little girl,” explained the actress Whoopi Goldberg in 2014, “it was like, ‘Oh, we Black people are in the future.’ Uhura did that for me.”46 “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” said Albert Einstein in 1931. “For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”47 We stand on the cusp of a new age, with many of us striving toward a more positive vision of the future like the one Roddenberry once provided, where human beings find a way to build a better world for subsequent generations of humanity. Our old ideas about patrilineality and patrilocality are no longer fit for that purpose. We need new ideas, new dreams, and the courage to imagine alternative futures. Now is the moment to “think different.” If we can imagine them first in a galaxy far, far away, it’s only a matter of time before we boldly go and begin figuring out how to translate these inspired visions into our own everyday utopias.”

enne📚 quoted The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #1)
Why have I survived? Because I am a creature more devious than all the other mes put together. Because I saw myself bleeding out and instead of checking for a pulse, I began collecting her things. I survive the desert like a coyote survives, like all tricksters do.
— The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #1)
Sally Strange wants to read How capitalism underdeveloped Black America by Manning Marable (South End Press classics ;)
Sally Strange wants to read Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden

Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
A groundbreaking thriller about a vigilante on a Native American reservation who embarks on a dangerous mission to track down …

KnitAFett reviewed Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Really good read, but reality is depressing.
4 stars
Actual : 4.5 stars
Weiden is an Indigenous author that I picked up for a book challenge that is meant to make me branch out my reading more. This was definitely an enjoyable read and the pacing was really good through the whole book.
There are so many issues that are covered in this book that everyone should be more aware of because they still happen to this day. The main storyline running through this book covers how there's a massive disconnect between what tribal police are able to take care of and what the feds deem to be worth their time. The disgust and disdain for the government is sprinkled liberally through, and justifiably so. These messages are so important to be able to put out there, and I'm glad that authors like Weiden are able to use their novels to get those messages out.
I don't even know …
Actual : 4.5 stars
Weiden is an Indigenous author that I picked up for a book challenge that is meant to make me branch out my reading more. This was definitely an enjoyable read and the pacing was really good through the whole book.
There are so many issues that are covered in this book that everyone should be more aware of because they still happen to this day. The main storyline running through this book covers how there's a massive disconnect between what tribal police are able to take care of and what the feds deem to be worth their time. The disgust and disdain for the government is sprinkled liberally through, and justifiably so. These messages are so important to be able to put out there, and I'm glad that authors like Weiden are able to use their novels to get those messages out.
I don't even know how else to explain this book, other than that you should really read it. It's one that I will purchase a copy of and keep on my shelf. I only give it 4.5 stars because the audiobook was a little hard to listen to. The narrator did a bit of a weird voice when reading the women's lines, so I wasn't able to stick with it and had to switch to the physical copy instead.
Sally Strange wants to read When the Earth Was Green by Riley Black
Sally Strange replied to radio-appears's status
@radio_appears@books.theunseen.city fascinating perspective! Thanks for the review.

radio-appears reviewed The Magicians by Lev Grossman (Magicians Trilogy, #1)
Hear Me Out:
So. Storytime. In my country, children are separated into different high schools at twelve years old, based on academical aptitude. At the highest level, there are two types of school, gymnasium and atheneum, with the only difference being that at a gymnasium they also teach Greek and Latin. That's the one I went to (not bragging, I was a very mediocre student). As you might imagine, the type of twelve-year old that chooses to go to a gymnasium usually isn't just smart, but also very driven to prove themselves academically. Many of us staked a lot of our self-esteem on our intelligence, especially if we didn't have a lot else going on, like also being athletic or socially gifted. We were all kind of used to being the smartest kid in the room, and then suddenly we weren't. Worse, there were always a couple of stand out, near genius level …
So. Storytime. In my country, children are separated into different high schools at twelve years old, based on academical aptitude. At the highest level, there are two types of school, gymnasium and atheneum, with the only difference being that at a gymnasium they also teach Greek and Latin. That's the one I went to (not bragging, I was a very mediocre student). As you might imagine, the type of twelve-year old that chooses to go to a gymnasium usually isn't just smart, but also very driven to prove themselves academically. Many of us staked a lot of our self-esteem on our intelligence, especially if we didn't have a lot else going on, like also being athletic or socially gifted. We were all kind of used to being the smartest kid in the room, and then suddenly we weren't. Worse, there were always a couple of stand out, near genius level students who were really only in that school because there wasn't anywhere higher for them to go to. So, what you get, is an entire school full of teenagers all simultaneously realising that the one trait they thought gave them value isn't actually all that special, while also dealing with the hormonal hell that is puberty.
Basically, what I'm saying is, I knew a lot of Quentins. Quite frankly, I was Quentin at times. I related very heavily to his character and really empathized with his struggles. Not because I thought his self-absorption, entitlement and disgust with mundanity were justified, but because I so deeply understood the insecurities those traits all stemmed from. I've been there, man.
And then I went online and found out that many readers absolutely hated his character and his personality ruined the books for them.
Well.
Always good to get an outside perspective.
But yeah, I really loved this book. Most of the characters are all kind of assholes with few redeeming traits (they get better in the sequels!) and magic isn't the fun escapism it usually is. It's an excellent deconstruction of both the worlds Hogwarts and Narnia present, which I honestly think is worthwhile for all fantasy fans to kind of ruminate on. Why do we so badly want to be whisked away to a school for special people with special powers that they very pointedly do not share with the rest of the world? Why do we want to live in a parallel world where we get to be kings and queens, and close personal friends with Jesus? We're not bad people for having these fantasies of being special and amazing, they're pretty much universal. But they're also something you need to let go of at a certain point in order to be happy as what you most likely are; an ordinary person with just as much of a right to rule a kingdom as anyone else. Taken as a whole, the series is a manifesto on the necessity of finding value in the life that exists when the adventure is over, to be happy with stability and mundanity, because nothing is so special you don't ultimately get used to it, and you can't find life satisfaction in continuing to chase the next big thrill. Satisfaction is not about getting everything you ever wanted, but about how to stop wanting when you have enough, which is what takes so long for Quentin to fully understand.