Last book of 2023! I had to quick finish up the last chapter to get it on here – lol! 

Utopia
By: Sir Thomas More
1516 in London
Read by: James Adams, 4 hrs and 10 mins
Rating - 10 / classic lit – philosophy?

Although I’d heard good things about this book since I was in the 10th grade. ??? up until a few days ago I’d never actually read Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. Someone in the All-nonfiction group nominated it as a scheduled read and I just put it on the list as though it were nonfiction.  I think I got it confused with Plato’s Republic.  

And now that I’ve read Utopia I don’t think I’ll mix them up again- lol. I must say I enjoyed Utopia far more than expected.  I’m not sure why.  I think because it was not difficult to read or to grasp and it was nicely written and organized. The concepts and ideas were quite interesting. While reading I  sometimes thought about how More’s world was in the 16th centuryand where would he have gotten even an inkling of such a different way of life!?  He wasn’t necessarily advocating the principles he set down about this other, imaginary, society of Utopians.  He was just explaining them. And he had had information about the New World – but maybe only Central and South America.

Anyway, More’s book is regarded as fiction while Plato’s Republic is always categorized as non-fiction (philosophy to be exact). I don’t know why More’s classic and most important work is fiction – but … I’ve only read bits of Plato’s masterwork and even less of Thomas More’s – maybe a few quotes.  I’ll see if I can get a chunk of The Republic read so as to compare/contrast.  

On my first reading I enjoyed almost all of it, 10 chapters about different aspects of life in Utopia, but there are some parts which are harder to read and really fathom. I kept asking how this or that was going to work. After the first chapter which is a kind of frame for the bulk of the text, I was glad the book is short. that Introduction about Raphael Hythloday was not easy but that’s the hardest it gets.

I’ll very likely read the whole book again at least once.  All I know about Thomas More I learned piecemeal at various times throughout my college career and independent reading. A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt (1960) was good.  And I loved all three novels in the Thomas Cromwell series by Hilary Mantel. But Utopia is by the man himself – and it doesn’t show the hard-ass manipulative guy Bolt described.

It’s very difficult to read this without seeing how different our times are from More’s and he was trying to describe a society he’d invented!?.   In my copy there is an Introduction by H.M. ??? which gives a brief biography of Sir Thomas More and a note on the publication history of the book. 

The first section of the book is called “Discourses of Raphael Hythloday of the Best State of a Commonwealth” And that’s what forms the frame for the story.  –              

Interesting quotes:
“No family may have less than ten and more than sixteen persons in it, but there can be no determined number for the children under age; this rule is easily observed by removing some of the children of a more fruitful couple to any other family that does not abound so much in them.”

“But if the natives refuse to conform themselves to their laws they drive them out of those bounds which they mark out for themselves, and use force if they resist, for they account it a very just cause of war for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated, since every man has, by the law of nature, a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence.”