#Manda Bonus: Word Magic 2025 – Accidental Gods’ pick of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and podcasts through the year
Here’s Manda’s round up of (some of) the best books, poetry and podcasts she’s come across this year. Most of the links are to Bookshop.org in the UK where you can link to an independent bookshop of your choice. In some cases, we’ve linked to the authors’ website.
Non-Fiction
Economic Space Agency (Dick Bryan, Jorge Lopez and Akseli Virtanen) – Protocols for Post Capitalist Expression
Richard Schwartz and Thomas Hübl – Releasing our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral and Collective Trauma
Julie Brams – The Nature Embedded Mind: How the Way We Think Can Heal Our Planet and Ourselves
Tristan Gooley – How to Read a Tree: Clues and Patterns from Roots to Leaves
Justine Afra Huxley and Anna Kovasna – Co-creating with a Living Intelligent Earth: Pathways towards Kincentric Leadership
Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares – If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies: The case against superintelligent AI
Permaculture magazine – link to find out more and/or subscribe
Fiction
Rachel Neumeier – Rihasi, Marag, Sekaran, Hedesa – all four are part of the TUYO series. 8 Doors from Dawn to Midnight is a stand alone.
Natasha Pulley – The Hymn to Dionysus
Antonia Hodgson – The Raven Scholar
Katherine Addison – The Tomb of Dragons
Amal El Mohtar – The River has Roots
Jacqui Morris and Tamsin Abbott – Wild Folk Wild Gods Rising (+ our Podcast with the authors)
Richard Morgan – Altered Carbon
Becky Chambers – A Long Way to A Small Angry Planet
Poetry
Andrea Gibson – You better be Lightning
Joy Harjo – A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales (+ YouTube Interview on the Power of Poetry)
Podcasts
Nate Hagens The Great Simplification – If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies: How Artificial SuperIntelligence Might Wipe Out our Entire Species w Nate Soares
Your Undivided Attention – Feed Drop: “Into the Machine” with Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Upstream – A World out of Balance: Introducing Doughnut 3.0 w Andrew Fanning
Point of Relation with Thomas Hübl – Becoming an Ally of Life
Love and Philosophy by Andrea Hiott– Moving Beyond Binaries in Eduction: Andrea Hiott in Conversation with Tim Logan of Future Learning Design
Future Learning Design – What’s Love Got to Do with Education? A Conversation with Dr Laura Penn, Khadija Shahper Backthiar, Jamie Bristow and Andrea Hiott
You may also like these recent podcasts
Call to Adventure! Crafting an Integral Altruism with Jonas Søvik
What is Integral Altruism and how could it crowd-source the answers to our meta crisis?
It’s a while since I learned about ‘reverse mentoring’: a young person mentoring someone of an older generation. The idea really took hold, so when a mutual friend connected Jonas Søvik and me, I knew I’d found someone from whom I could learn a huge amount about life, ideas, thoughts and how the world feels in circles I would otherwise never reach.
Honouring Fear as Your Mentor: Thoughts from the Edge with Manda Scott
Manda dives deep into the nature of fear, what it is and how we might find our own resources, resilience and capacity to work with the parts that catch our attention. Given this, it is recommended that you listen at a time and place where you can give it full attention.
Co-ordiNations vs the Network State: Greenland and the Schism in Global Vision with Dr Andrea Leiter
What is a Network State and how does the concept matter in relation to the Trump administration’s attempts to take Greenland – and their ‘peace’ proposals in Gaza and Ukraine?
Tracking the Wild Things, Inside and Out – with Jon Young of Living Connection 1st
How can we step into our birthright as fully conscious nodes in the Web of Life, offering the astonishing creativity of humanity in service to life? Our guest this week helps people do just this…
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