 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about or set in a non-patriarchal society
Book: Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. LeGuin A science fiction writer's dream: a 500+ page book that's all world building. It's presented as an anthropological study of the Kesh, who live in a valley in a far-future California where the USA has been forgotten and fossil fuels have run out. The Kesh live close to the land; they have technology, but no cars, television, or computers. The book was written pre-Internet; now it's hard to imagine a people so uninterested in the outside world. There's a story that takes up less than a third of the book, told by a woman who left the peaceful valley of the Kesh to live with her foreign father in his very patriarchal, warlike society. Years later she flees, taking the new name of Woman Coming Home. But mostly the book is a collage of brief sections about Kesh social organization, customs, festivals, marriage and family, music, food, poetry, clothing, medicine, war, birth and death customs, and a considerable glossary. It's a world you can step into and walk around in.
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