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.

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