National university takes soundings on a Mahusetan book club

Lazia, 27 August 2026 — The Mahusetan National University (MNU) has asked whether there is enough appetite in Mahuset and among friendly countries for a book club, and will start one only if more than five people put their names forward. No club has been founded, no first meeting has been arranged and no reading has been set; the university described the exercise as soundings rather than a launch. A shortlist of twenty-two titles has been published alongside the appeal.

Participation is open to people from Mahuset and to those from otherwise friendly countries, with the university naming the Batyr Bloc in particular. The bloc was agreed on 2 November 2020 and has Mahuset, Hasanistan and Brennonia as its core members; it exists for diplomatic co-operation, joint projects and cultural exchange, counts the mutual support of national cultural development among its aims, and meets in summit at roughly three-month intervals under a rotating chair. Readers from the wider Community of Small Nations may also come forward.

The MNU was established by the National Convention of 2019 in December 2021 and kept dormant until 26 April 2022, when it was brought into operation and took in twelve of the Confederation’s academic institutes — the sciences, technology, engineering, mathematics, computer science, the arts, popular culture, philosophy, theology, economics, geopolitics and strategy, and anime and manga — constituting them as a single public university under the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport and Science. Six institutes remained outside the merger, two of them renamed the same day: the Institute for Heraldry, Arms and Emblems became the Mahusetan College of Arms, and the Institute for Linguistics became the Joint Vetrisphere Linguistics Institute.

The shortlist runs to twenty-two entries and carries no ranking. Four are narrative works: Dune, Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel of 1965; Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the Texas–Mexico borderlands at the middle of the nineteenth century; Storm of Steel, Ernst Jünger’s memoir of his service on the Western Front, published in German in 1920 as In Stahlgewittern; and The Sea of Fertility, the tetralogy by Yukio Mishima. The last of these runs to four volumes — Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel — a length the university said members would have to weigh before choosing it.

Five deal with government and society. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed argues against democratic government from a libertarian standpoint. Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville’s study published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, describes American institutions and manners as the author found them on his travels. America Against America sets down the observations of the Chinese academic Wang Huning, later a leading theorist of the Chinese Communist Party, after a period in the United States as a visiting scholar in the late 1980s. James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State examines the schemes by which governments make their populations legible, and the reasons the author gives for their failure. De verweesde samenleving, which the Dutch sociologist and publicist Pim Fortuyn, later a politician, published in 1995, treats the loss of shared norms and authority in Dutch society; the title translates roughly as “The Orphaned Society”.

Four are concerned with culture, identity and conflict. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996 by the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, argues that conflict after the Cold War would fall along cultural and religious lines between civilisations rather than along ideological or economic ones. Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke, published in 2023, traces contemporary identity politics in the United States to civil rights law and its enforcement. Douglas Murray has two entries on the list: The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, published in 2017, which treats immigration into Europe and the question of European identity, and The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, which followed in 2019 and treats public argument over those three subjects.

Six are history, biography and memoir: Tom Holland’s Dominion, on the mark left by Christianity on Western thought; Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, published in 1974, a biography of the New York official Robert Moses and of the powers he assembled; and From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000, Lee Kuan Yew’s account of Singapore’s development, written by the man who governed the island for most of that period. The remaining three are Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, David Hackett Fischer’s study of 1989, which follows four waves of British migration to America between 1629 and 1775 and holds that their regional folkways shaped later American political culture; Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory, Lisa Jardine’s book of 2008 on the cultural and political influence that ran from the Dutch Republic to England in the seventeenth century, culminating in the accession of William of Orange; and The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–32, William E. Leuchtenburg’s history of 1958, covering the United States from its entry into the First World War to the Great Depression.

Standing outside these groups is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, on the part played by chance in markets and in ordinary judgement. The two remaining entries are the Bible and the Quran, the scriptures of Christianity and of Islam.

Asked about the range of the shortlist, a spokesman for the university said the titles had been put forward by staff and by people outside the university and had been kept as they came in. “Twenty-two were proposed and twenty-two were kept,” he said. “It is a list of suggestions, not a syllabus. Nothing was taken off it and nothing was added. The members can settle the order among themselves.”

Expressions of interest go to the university registry by 30 September, giving the applicant’s name, country and, if they wish, the three titles they would most like to read first. If more than five are received, the club will be constituted and a first title chosen by those who have joined; if five or fewer are received, nothing further will follow and the shortlist will be kept on file. The form and frequency of any meetings, in Lazia and remotely, will be settled once the numbers are known.