Bookish Thoughts

I remember struggling a lot with LeGuin's books when I first began reading her. Every book felt like an argument. I never agreed with her fully, but I had to think hard to refine my own point of view, and I appreciated that. I always came out of her books feeling more sure of  myself for having thought deeper about the issues she presented. This book was different. I'm not sure if it's because my ideals have changed over the past decade or if I know what to expect from LeGuin now or is it's just where she was in her life, but this book was entirely on my wavelength. Like much of her work, it posits anarchy as an alternative to fascism and weaves in a healthy dose of feminism. Whatever it was, I loved this book. It might be my favorite of hers - though I think I also said that about the last LeGuin book. Maybe she's just converting me to her way of thinking.

Reading a novel by Ursula K LeGuin is rarely as simple as reading a novel. When I first started reading her work, it always felt like an argument. She is someone who has thought deeply about what she believes and her work considers a lot of different points of view. I never agreed with her fully, but she was so knowledgeable and sharp that her writing forced me to become more knowledgeable and sharp. Her work never let me be complacent in my beliefs. I always found myself having to defend my own point of view against the one she presented, because she made me consider things I hadn't before. Reading LeGuin is work, but good work, work worth doing. Her books have always made me a smarter, better person. Always Coming Home is a departure in that it felt like a conversation but not an argument. I'm not sure if that's because I've come around to LeGuin's way of seeing things as I've aged or if it's just that this book is so gentle. It's incredibly radical, ...

What if Game of Thrones was only 120 pages long? That's flip, and LeGuin and Martin are two very different authors, but I can't help but feel like this novella was an influence for GRRM's much longer (and unfinished) series. Planet of Exile takes place on a planet with a much larger orbit than Earth - one Year lasts for sixty Earth-years, meaning that winter lasts for 15 years. We're the aliens on this world, though the human settlement as been there for 600 years (or 10 Years) and is more of a city than a settlement now. As winter begins, several nomadic tribes begin their journey south, raiding as they go. But this year, they're banding together to become a larger threat. The humans and the locals need to figure out how to work together if they're going to survive the sacking and have enough supplies to make it through winter. It's a much more plausible scenario than the hand-wavey magic in A Song of Ice and Fire , and it's still packed with p...

My favorite thing about Ursula LeGuin's work is how hard it makes me think. I don't always agree with her, but in reading her arguments I find I have to sharpen my own. I usually come out of her books either having my mind (slightly) changed or feeling much more secure in my own beliefs. It's a fantastic experience. It's also a ton of work. This collection of essays was much more accessible and easier to read than her fiction tends to be. In most cases, she's distilled her ideas into 4-ish page essays. It's a great way to engage with her thoughts without having to do all the work that, say, The Left Hand of Darkness , requires of you. I really liked these essays, which were mostly ruminations on the end of life, as she came to the end of hers. I only wish there had been a few more about her cat, Pard. But I suppose I can always go to her blog for more of that content.

The Lathe of Heaven  is considered by many to be LeGuin's best work. Though, to be fair, a lot of her books are considered her best by a lot of people. She's written so much good stuff that there just isn't a consensus on what her best work is. But that does make me eager to keep seeking out her books. This one was almost more of a parable than a proper story. George Orr has dreams that can change the world, though he can't control them. He dreams something and it comes into being. He wants to be rid of this power. But his doctor sees the potential and, using hypnosis to shape Orr's dreams, he starts to exploit him. Doctor Haber isn't really an evil man. He's ambitious, but he really does try to improve the world for everyone. He focuses on lessening the effects of climate change and overpopulation, of ending war and racism and poverty. The problem is that these problems are so big and interconnected that "solving" one always has unintended con...

The Word for World is Forest  is a quick little story that reminded me of nothing so much as Avatar . That comparison feels a bit unfair to LeGuin. After all, Avatar  was a movie with a mostly forgettable plot and characters that achieved huge success mostly because it looked cool (and because it tricked us all into shelling out for the more expensive 3D tickets). LeGuin's novella does a whole lot more than look cool. But the bones of the plot are the same. Humanity has discovered a planet with a valuable resource (wood, in this case, which Earth has run out of) and has determined to take it all for themselves, ignoring the local life who are seen as so primitive that our only choice is to either exterminate them or force them into slave labor.The book switches between three points of view: Captain Davidson is heading up one of the logging camps, and he provides the most heinous voice as he keeps finding new ways to justify the atrocities he commits. Raj Lyubov is an anthrop...

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. A...

This is easily my favorite LeGuin book yet. I don't know if that's because I'm more familiar with her work and know what to expect from her (and what is probably asking too much) or if this book really is head and shoulders above the rest (it has been argued that this is so). Regardless, it was fantastic and it made my brain buzz in all sorts of good ways. The book follows one man's journey through two diametrically opposite cultures. The chapters alternate between his life growing up on the moon Anarres, where a libertarian anarchy holds everyone equal, and his time as a professor on the planet Urras, where a highly regulated capitalism maintains strong class and gender divides. All his life he's been told that his home is a utopia, the planet a stand-in for hell. But he's not satisfied until he can see this for himself, and he wants to bring his ideals back to the planet and build a better society there. But he discovers that things aren't quite that sim...

I have a weird relationship with Ursula K Le Guin's work. I feel like I'm supposed to like her more than I actually do. Not that I actively dislike her. But I always find myself disagreeing with her about something fundamental. As beautiful as her prose tends to be, and as forward-thinking and progressive as many of her ideas are, we just seem to be coming from different places. I think it boils down to the fact that she's espousing feminist ideas from a generation or two ago, and they simply aren't radical enough to interest me. The Left Hand of Darkness does some interesting things with gender by essentially getting rid of it in all but on character and making that one character undeniably alien. A more strange stranger in a stranger land than anything Heinlein ever conceived. And to an extent it's interesting to see this alien, Genly Ai, continuously project gender onto everyone around him. It makes sense. As the book points out the very first t...

The Other Wind is the final (for now) book in the Earthsea series. And it is easily the best. The plot moves along at a good pace and is satisfactorily resolved. There are a ton of characters with interesting relationships that shift over the course of the novel. LeGuin even managed to devote an entire chapter to sailing without boring me. On the contrary, that time was used quite well for the development of various characters and the history of Earthsea. This book manages to pick up plot threads I'd thought long abandoned, like the dismal afterlife, and make them relevant again to the lives of both new and old characters. Many of my disappointments with the earlier books were addressed and resolved in this one. As rocky as the series has been, it honestly may have been worth it just to get to the end. The series as a whole has, unfortunately, left me wary of LeGuin's other work. I'll probably read The Left Hand of Darkness at some point, but I'm not s...

In Tales From Earthsea , LeGuin departs from the novel format to tell a collection of short stories set in various places and times in Earthsea. Although short stories is, perhaps, a generous term. Two of the five stories are closer to novellas in length. Overall this book was more successful than LeGuin's previous Earthsea novels. The shorter length gives her writing a focus it definitely needs. There are no lengthy passages about sailing, no extended diatribes about the differences between men and women. Instead we get some neat character studies, woven together with some history of Earthsea. The Finder is the longest of the five stories, taking up over 150 pages in my book. It tells the history of the wizard's school, how it was founded and why. And although I'm not quite sure I understand why the men decided to force their female peers out of the school, or why the women let them, it was fun to see this bit of Earthsea history, and to see what the wor...

Tehanu is the fourth book in the Earthsea cycle and another example of how up and down this series is. It's not quite as good as The Tombs of Atuan was, but it is significantly better than the other two books that came before it. Tehanu was written nearly three decades after the first two books, and it takes place in the winter of Ged and Tenar's lives. Ged has stepped down as archmage and is somewhat lost throughout the book. Tenar is a grandmother now, and trying to redefine herself again since her children have moved out of the house and her husband has died. She adopts a young girl, Therru, who was abused and is disfigured. The bulk of the book is pretty slow. It's mostly musings on feminism and how to start fresh when your life is mostly over. I liked the slow, meandering pace of the book. Although parts of it got preachy and, like Atuan , there were parts that made me wonder if LeGuin lives in the same world as I do. She talks at length about a woma...

The Farthest Shore  is the third book in Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea  cycle. It's also probably the weakest, which is sad. In reading this series and talking to other people, I'm discovering that LeGuin can be a bit hit or miss. She has some great books mixed in with some not-so-great books. This book really suffered from uneven pacing. Like the first book in the series, there were entire chapters devoted to sailing between islands. Action scenes seemed to come out of nowhere. At one point I had to re-read a page three times before I was satisfied that I hadn't missed anything; an chase had just started without warning. I also had a hard time accepting the philosophy of this book. Ged, the old, wise wizard, spends a lot of time trying to teach his young charge, Arren, that action is bad because it tends to upset the balance. Ged is a very passive character who mostly strives to be rather than to do. This is entirely at odds with the saving the world p...

The Tombs of Atuan  is the second book in the Earthsea cycle by Ursula LeGuin. This series is the first (and possibly only?) LeGuin tried her hand at YA. While the first book suffered from some pacing issues, the second book was orders of magnitude better. The second book shifts its focus away from Ged, protagonist of the first book. Instead it follows young Arha, nee Tenar, the head priestess of a dying religion. She's mostly in charge of making sure her gods are still being sacrificed to on a regular basis. But since so few people still worship, her life is pretty boring. This all changes when Ged breaks into her temple in an effort to steal an artifact. The two become friends and end up saving each other. The book is mostly interesting for being a feminist tale from the early 70s. Some themes are familiar, but others are strangely foreign. There are things that are basic facts of my life that LeGuin couldn't even imagine several decades ago. She talks ab...

A Wizard of Earthsea is the first of Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books. It's also the first YA book she ever wrote, according to a note at the end of the book, which may explain some of the issues I had with the pacing of the story. The book follows Ged, a boy who is born with a talent for magic. Over the course of the story he begins to study magic, heads off to a university for sorcerers, graduates, and faces some initial challenges. I think the rest of the series follows the remainder of his life, but the first book is really about him growing up. While the plot is a bit cliched at this point, I imagine it was fairly fresh when LeGuin wrote it back in the 60s. And I really enjoyed the world building. A country made of hundreds of islands isn't something I'm used to, and it was neat that sailing played such a large part in the story. Although there were parts when the sailing went on so long that I felt like I was playing Windwaker. I also really lik...