Rating: WARTY!
Originally published (in Latin in 1516!) as A truly golden little book, no less beneficial than entertaining, of a republic's best state and of the new island Utopia this book proved to be as boring as the title. It began well enough, but though it's fiction, it is by no means a story as we would imagine one in modern times. It's much more like a lecture that will put you to sleep, so don't listen, as I did, while driving! Although I survived it, the lethargic and droning delivery could prove fatal in some circumstances!
I made it about 60% of the way through, and I was planning on finishing out the week with it, but after listening to it while driving home on the Thursday I grew so deadened by it that I couldn't stand to listen to it on the Friday, so I ditched it for something else. The reader, James Adams has a voice that doesn't help. My Latin is barely existent, and although this is fortunately in modern English, it's possible to imagine that More himself is reading it. It started out well enough, but over time, it became repetitive, plodding, and tedious to listen to.
Utopia is supposedly an island, although it actually was a peninsular though which a canal was cut to separate it from the mainland. The problem is that there's nothing Utopian about it. Life is highly regimented and there is slavery and a death penalty, so how this remotely resembles any idea of a utopia we may hold today was a mystery to me.
The "islanders" have rejected money as any sort of local currency, although they do use it in foreign trade if necessary (trade, after all, literally meant a trade - one item of goods offered for a different item in return), but the society itself is pretty much a communist one along the lines of everything being held in common, with each giving according to ability and receiving according to need, although there is more to it than that in this case. The thing is that while all this may have been original five hundred years ago and may even have impressed some people, clearly it impressed precious few since it never took hold. Today, it's nothing more than quaintly antique, and it offers nothing special, or new or interesting.
In some parts it was unintentionally amusing, being rather reminiscent of the board game The Settlers of Catan where sheep and bricks are traded, and little else. I've never played that game but I am familiar with it, and it was amusing how limited this 'vision' was - about as limited in scope as the game. Though I can't commend this at all as a worthy read, my recent migration through reading/listening to antique works continues to at least to one more volume - but by a different author. I'll post that review anon.
