"This is fine, if a bit long and baggy, for like commodity fiction, but it was really disappointing as a book from an author with literary proclivities. It's an important subject whose potential is ruined in this book by a failure at some of the basics of writing well. The characters are just barely two dimensional, and their interactions often feel as if written by somebody who has never actually witnessed human interaction outside of badly written dialogue. The details of the book are sufficiently close to our current reality as to not feel outlandishly dystopian but sufficiently off kilter as to not feel quite real, which makes reading it a really strange experience. To work well, fiction of this sort needs to be either outlandish or close enough to reality that the divergences from reality are really significant, and I don't think Eggers achieves that balance."

"...The plot follows two different sets of characters, switching off every chapter until the climax where they meet… for all of one page. There was no discussion, no one learned anything and nothing was solved. By the time I got through 80% of the story, I worried that there wouldn’t be enough time to do something compelling to give a reason for the trials and tribulations of the previous couple hundred pages. Sadly, those worries were well founded...."

• danielctr's review - "...I simply could not get myself to care very much about the main relationship between Ludwik and Janusz. Also I feel that the main focus of the book is quite unclear...."
• randomheart's review - "...I think my main problem with this novel was that, other than the physical magnetic pull that Ludwik and Janusz had for one another, I didn't really see why they would fall in love with each other on a deeper level. I needed more depth and substance to their relationship. If I had been more invested in their relationship, the politics driving them apart would have hit me in a more substantial manner too. I really wanted to FEEL the angst and conflict between them, but it all just felt a little too anticlimactic to me in the end. Janusz kind of felt too mysterious to me throughout for me to fully connect with as well. I just needed more overall..."

"It felt as if the words and the thoughts of the narrator—despite their agony, despite their pain—healed some of my agony and my pain, simply by existing."

"You can't make people love you the way you want them to" 

"Because you were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want" 

“No matter what happens in the world, however brutal or dystopian a thing, not all is lost if there are people out there risking themselves to document it. Little sparks cause fires, too.”

"We are just queuing for a possibility. Queuing for something. Maybe queuing for nothing." ...
"But it will pass, even the longest queue dissolves eventually"

"To my own surprise, I was unable to accept the shame he wanted me to feel. It was too familiar to be imposed. I had produced it for myself for such a long time that right then I found I had no space left for it anymore." 

"All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change."

"Then, someday when people are able to pay more attention to what I say than how old I am, I'll use these verses to pry them loose from their rotting past, and maybe push them into saving themselves and building a future that makes sense. That's if everything will just hold together for a few more years."

"Sometimes naming a thing - giving a name or discovering a name - helps one to begin to understand it. Knowing the name of a thing and knowing what that thing is for gives me even more of a handle on it."

"Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven't been wiped out by a plague so they're still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have change a lot, and they'll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they're waiting for the old days to come back."

"She was afraid, and that made her defensive."

"Civilisation is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilisation, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilisation fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING."

"Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent specied may make in a single generation, other species may make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING."

"Once people get the idea that it's all right to take what you want and destroy the rest,  who know's when they'll stop."

"We aren't gang types. I don't want gang types with their need to dominate, rob and terrorize. And yet me wight have to dominate. We might have to rob to survive, and even terrorize to scare of or kill enemies. We'll have to be very careful how we allow our needs to shape us. But we must have arable land, a dependable water supply, and enough freedom from attack to let us establish ourselves and grow."

"Worship is no good without action. With action, it's only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, eases your mind."

"Kindness eases change. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING"

"Oh, God, there you go again. You've always got a disaster up your sleeve."
"I see what's out there. You see it too. You just deny it."

"I believe in something that I think my dying, denying, backward-looking people need. I don't have all of it yet. I don't even know how to oass on what I do have. I've got to learn how to do that. It scares me how many things I've got to learn. How will I learn them?"

"Belief initiates and guide action, or it does nothing. - earthseed: the books of the living."

"Embrace diversity, Unite - Or be divided, robbed, rules, killed, by those you see as prey. Embrace diversity or be destroyed."

"'Live!' Dad said. 'That's all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don't know if good times are coming back again. But I know it won't matter if we don't survive these times.'...And Dad is right...but he doesn't go far enough... It isn't enough for us to just survive, limping along, playing business as usual while things get worse and worse. If that's the shape we give to God, then someday we must become too weak - too poor, too hungry, too sick - to defend outselves. Then we'll be wiped out. There has to be more that we can do, a better destiny that we can shape. Another place. Another way. Something!"

"British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive mean spirited and often callous appraoch."

"The deliberate, active, and persistent maltreatment of Britain's disabled people has gone beyond critical levels. Over the course of a decade people with disabilities, chronic illness, abd mental health problems have beeb routinely driven into destitution, pushed from the workplace, and stripped from the right to live in their own homes. " - Mr. Philip Alston, former Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, November 2018

"The gains that generations of disabled campaigners fought for have been rapidly rolled back. And the promise that the great British welfare state will always will always protect disabled people shown to be little more than a fantasy."

"There's no such thing as a male hormone or a female hormone. It's a common misconception. We all have the same hormones, Christine drey revealed to me over Skype. All that differs between males and females are the relative amounts of enzymes that convert the sex steroids from one to another, and distribution and sensitivity, of hormone receptors."

"According to crusie, there are five types of sex: chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, morphological, and behavioural. They don't necessarily all agree with each other or stay fixed for life. They are cumalative and emergent in nature. They can be influenced by genes or hormones, the environment or even an animals life experience"

"These females teach us that sex is no crystal ball it is neither static nor deterministic but a dynamic and flexible trait just like any other, that's shaped by the peculiar interaction of shared genes with the environment, further scultored by an animals developmental and social life histories plus a sprinkling of chance."

"Rather than thinking of the sexes as wholly different biological entities , we should consider them members of the same species with fluid complementary differences in certain biological and physiological processes associated with reproduction , but otherwise much the same." 

"The time has come to ditch damaging and frankly deluded binary expectations because in nature, the female experience exists on a genderless continuum. It is variable, highly plastic, and refuses to conform to archaic classifications. Our appreciation of this fact can only enrich our understanding of the natiral world and empathy for one another as humans. Maintainig a dogged belief in antiquated sex differeunces only serves to fuel unrealistic expectations of women and men , foster poor intersexual relations, and promote sexual inequality."

I was really excited to read this book and so I think part of my rating is the let down that it just didn’t deliver. The book was like a love letter to herself and her coining the term IE and the organization with the same name. Most of the quotes in the book are from her and her fellow cofounders, which doesn’t bode well for the amount of research put into the book. There wasn’t much.

1. Art in the mechanical age of reproduction, class conscious
2. The sexual politics of meat, absent referent and commodification/objectification of women
3. Nude Vs naked in European painting 
4. Age, birth/death, decadence? Men as the spectator-owner if art. Male gaze? The European obsession with youthfulness and virality. I found this picture essay difficult to interpret.
5. The European oil painting tradition, materialisam, capitalist class ownership, owner-spectator viewer, static
6. The objectification of living things (animals and human such as enslaved people as accessories or tools serving white Europeans), decadence, women as temptresses. Anything that's not a white European man is depicted morally bad? Centrality of white supremacy and patriachy?  I found this picture essay difficult to interpret.
7. Low art, advertisement being a continuity of language of oil painting, borrowing its legitimacy in order to sell, fucntions differently to oil painting as is future focused rather than static.Spectator owner to spectator buyer and consumer.

"The way we see things is affected by what weknow or what we believe."

"Images were first made to conjure up the appearance of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then howed how something or somebody had once looked - and thus by implication how the subject has once been seen by other people."

"History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. [when speaking of mystification]."

"The convention of perspective, which is unique to Eurpean art and which was first established in the early Renaissance, centres everything on the eye of the beholder...According to the convention of perspective there is no visual repriciocity."

"Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and particularly an object of vision: a sight."

"To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A naked bosy has to be seen as an object to become a nude. Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display."

"But the essential way of seeing women, the essentail use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way to men - not because the feminie is different to the masculine - but because the 'ideal' spectator is always assumed to be mal and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him."

"The art of any culture will show a wide differential of talent. But in not other culture is the difference between 'masterpiece' and average work so large as in the tradition of the oil painting... the difference is not a question of skill or imagination, but also of morale. The average work...was a work produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful ot the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product... Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the results of the market making more insistent demand than the art."

"Until very recently...a certain moral value was ascribed to the study of classics. This was because the classics...supplied the higher strata of the ruling class with a system of references for the forms of their own idealised behaviour...They offered examples of how the heightened moment is life...should be loved, or at least should be seen to be lived. Yet why are these picture so vacuous and perfunctory in their evocation of the scenes they are meant to recreate? They do not need to stimulate the imagination... this would have served their purpose less well. Their purpose was not to transport their spectator-owners into new experience, but to embellish such experience as they already possessed."

"it is important not to confuse publicity with the pleasure of benefits to be enjoyed from the thing it advertises...publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is about the future buyer. If offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. the image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. What makes this self which-he-might-be envious? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects."

"Publicity is the culture of the consumer society... There are several reasons why these images use the language of oil painting. Oil painting, before it was anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art form is derived from the principle that you are what you have."

"The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggets that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better."

"Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was then once achieved by extensive depreivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable."