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Another strong, philosophical, and wise book by Le Guin, which also has its share of adventure.  There's really only one thing that keeps it from being a 5 star book for me.  While that thing is a bit spoilery, which is why I'm not going to specifically name it, it is actually only mentioned a couple of times, and is not particularly important to the book as a whole. Which is why it knocks off only a quarter point.

The vast majority of this book is “humor”, but not any type of humor that I can appreciate. I found it to be a real chore to read this book, and I only persisted in doing so for its historical significance. At least I was rewarded with a final chapter which was devoid of “humor”, and which gave some hints as to what the Roman cults of Isis and Osiris were like. 

A series of semi-autobiographical vignettes about Mari and Jonna. While there were a couple of early chapters that I did not much enjoy, for the most part this is a beautiful and honest book about love, and about creativity. 

This short book is very interesting, perhaps most as a history of organized labor, Anarchism and Syndicalism. It is all the more interesting for having been written during the Spanish Civil War, just before the start of World War II, and for the epilogue, written nine years later, shortly after the end of WWII, which provides an update on the state of Anarcho-Syndicalism in the world at that time. The introduction, with biographical information about Rocker, and the story of how the book came into being, is also valuable. Despite featuring prominently in the subtitle, the theory of Anarcho-Syndicalism gets less attention than the practice.

It’s mid-nineties cyberpunk. Rather more convoluted and odd than many of its kin. 

Quite a page-turner. I have some qualms about certain aspects of the book, but it undeniably kept me engaged. 

The edition that I read was more than 1100 pages, but I never got tired of reading it, or felt like I needed a break. This is in some ways Murakami’s strangest novel, but it is as fascinatingly readable as any of his work. 

An extremely important book. The information and conclusions presented are unlikely to be surprising to any moderately intelligent person who has thought about these issues at all—after all, the evidence that is now available merely supports what was intuitively understood by people at least as far back as the nineteenth century. But having that evidence can be critical in policy debates. 

This is a mostly dark story, though it does have a positive ending. It is good to see Le Guin’s first stab at a female protagonist, but unfortunate that (as she acknowledges in the afterword of the edition I read) she didn’t yet feel that she could actually write a female character with agency. 

Very much a mixed bag, as anthologies so often are. There were at least three stories about female-led societies, and those were among the most interesting to me, though they were not all among my favorites. Many of the stories have at least a hint of the weird/creepy, and a couple were, I’d say, outright horror.

I am glad to have read this from a historical and cultural perspective. When reading literature from a century ago or more, it is often necessary to note certain problematic elements and move on, and that was certainly the case here, though there were one or two things that I might have had trouble forgiving even at the time of publication. Still, on balance, an interesting and enjoyable read. 

How to review this book? It is unquestionably well written. It is also pretty thoroughly unpleasant. There is barely one likable character in it, and that not the main character. Mind you, I didn’t necessarily dislike Smiley. He’s too much of a cipher to dislike (which is just, it would seem, as it is meant to be). I doubt that I will be reading any more Le Carré. 

I have been reading Utopian literature for the past four decades. There are other works in this genre which I have enjoyed very much, but I must say that, among pure Utopian visions, this book is my favorite, and the nearest to my own idea of an ideal society. Being 135 years old, there are, of course, a few unexamined prejudices which must be forgiven, but surprisingly few, and mild.

An excellent novel which examines a society that has essentially the same basis as Morris’s imagined future, but set in a much more challenging environment, and with greater emphasis on exploring the challenges such a society might face, is Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. Morris calls his Utopia “Communism” while LeGuin calls hers “Anarchism”, but in their tenets there is very little between them. 

Every American (probably every person on Earth) should read this book, now. It packs a surprising amount of information, and an essential quantity of advice, into a compact—indeed, petite—volume. And if a good chunk of us do not gain, and act on, the knowledge available in this book, then living under tyranny is all that we have to look forward to.