Words Are My Matter

I have been slow to fall in love with Ursula K LeGuin. I struggled with Earthsea (which I actually want to revisit now). I ultimately really enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness, though I had a hard time with the middle of it. I loved The Dispossessed. And I actually really liked LeGuin's intro to my edition of The Left Hand of Darkness. In the wake of her recent death (and because I loved The Dispossessed so much), I wanted to read more of her work. And her non-fiction seemed like the next logical move.

I have to say, this was a bit of a mixed bag. I really enjoyed some of the essays. Others fell flat. A third of the book is book reviews, mostly of books and authors I'd never heard of. But the books I had heard of are ones with a special place in my heart, so now my to-read list has once again grown bigger.

An aside, one of the reviews is for a collection of short stories by Italo Calvino that had been translated from Italian. They seemed interesting and quirky. And then one of them is called The Stone Sky and it's about a race of crystalline beings who live under the Earth's crust and can travel through the earth and now I have to track it down because I know NK Jemisin is a smart and thorough author who definitely referenced that story in her most recent novel which I loved dearly.

So, the highs were pretty high. But I ended up stretching the book out over almost a week because I just couldn't read that many of the essays back to back. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and it gave me more time to digest what I did read.

Maybe LeGuin will always be hit or miss for me. At the very least, after reading this book, I'm confident that she would be pleased that I disagree with her about some things.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more