Ursula Le Guin: Classic or Dud? Search and Destroy

recently got around to the western shore trilogy. more self-consciously YA than the earthsea books i think but v worthwhile.

Just read first four earthsea in a few weeks

How did you find the (to my mind) abrupt left turn or even reversal of the 4th book, handbrake applied, tyres smoking?

Hmmm

I thought the book was as good as the others, tho my fave maybe was the second one

I hadn't realised the big gap in time between writing, and even in the second one I think there's at least some shadowing that this was not a well-thought out rescue long-term, so given my reading through as quickly as I did I have to say it seemed to follow on quite fluidly.

I managed to get through the Dispossessed a couple of years ago, mostly off the back of Ilxor-based recommendations. I found it a total slog and it's put me off investigating UKLG further. That said, I appreciated her premise, and her world-building is strong, despite the heavy-handedness of the West/USSR/Third World analogy. I just didn't like the way it was written. I couldn't warm to the characters - a book where everyone is a dry, humourless vessel speaking in expository statements. I get that Shevek and his people came from an ascetic background, and their stolidness was part of their national characteristic, but there was no warmth, no reason for me to care for anyone in the story.

I liked The Disposessed but I did find the prose a bit drab and grey; the one Earthsea book was much more vivid in that regard.

Lhod too.

My thoughts on Tehanu are that she writes a series of books full of decent upstanding & all male wizards, with phrases like "weak as woman's magic, wicked as woman's magic". Then some years pass, she thinks "fuck that shit" and writes a bleak book about an abusive patriarchy where the main character from the previous ones is metaphorically emasculated.

Then more years pass, and everything changes again...

The Disposessed is plainly a novel of ideas rather than of character, so I don't think it's part of Le Guin's purpose to make us 'care' about Shevek (though in fact I rather like his stoic drabness). One of the novel's themes is that 'radical' ways of living are not necessarily glamorous or spectacular - building a just community is hard toil - so the writing style seems entirely appropriate.

Ward Fowler - I guess, yeah and I agree and I get it, but it just doesn't work for me as a novel. It's gotta work on more than one level or otherwise it's a piece of polemic hanging loosely off a fictional structure.
Attempts to fill-out the characters feel half-arsed. The various clerics and professors Shevek meets on Urras are interchangeable save fore their political views. Similarly, Sheveks friends and relations on Annares - one character is said to be putting on weight, another has 'a big open-mouthed laugh' (or words to that effect), but these descriptions feel very 'if I must', and have little-to-no resonance with the rest of the plot. It's as though LeGuinn felt obliged to throw these points in because 'that's what happens in novels'.

this is well worth watching. kinda got choked up at one point. love her voice so much. very inspirational!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Deuas-AuzbU

thx scott. she's a good egg. however her dream of sf escaping the ghetto library shelf and review column has not come to pass and i suspect it never will, & i'm ok with that.

I read tehanu again, stylistically yep it has her usual economical, elegant prose, but tonally i think it is leagues from the first three books. even at its calmest it is bucolic not fantastic. magic has been left behind in favour of goat herding and peach trees. evil, when it occurs, is not due to vengeful elder gods or power-mad mages - ok one power-mad mage, but also just bad men (definitely men) doing things depressingly right out of our world - child abuse, rape. it's an angry book, even if it finds moments of peace.

Thanks, thread - I bought an ebook of Left Hand of Darkness and am just about to finish it. What a read! As someone said upthread it too a while to get into (some of the localised words I kept forgetting quite what they meant), but yes after the escape and trek over the ice - that whole section is so beautifully written for something so brutal and potentially monotonous.

I was having trouble with how I should be visualizing the towns/cities in Gethen - it seemed slightly medieval, yet there were cars and things so I wasnt sure how modern things were meant to be.

rip

May the work live forever.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k-le-guin-acclaimed-for-her-fantasy-fiction-is-dead-at-88.html

oh no i'm right in the middle of dispossessed, my first leguin, and loving it so much!

RIP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONrJIDGxHjk

RIP. I feel like a schmuck posting here because I haven't actually read any, but she's been on my to-read list for ages. Loads of people have been posting interviews w/ her on twitter and she seems *even cooler* than I had thought she might be.

Oh man. I'm literally in the middle of reading the Earthsea trilogy with my son -- we're halfway thru book 2. She was such a good writer, and her empathy had a real edge to it -- she understood people well enough not to sentimentalize them.

dispossessed is the best book ever written

i mean not really but in the moment i felt that

Two years ago my wife and I flew to PDX to surprise my wife's grandmother on her 80th birthday. We had some time to kill in the evening before the party, so we took our rental car and went wandering up along the Columbia. At some point we pulled over to a little park to watch the sunset. There were only two other people in the park: LeGuin and her assistant. They sat at a picnic table, LeGuin holding some manuscript pages and watching the sunset, and the assistant fussing with her phone. Always Coming Home is one of my favorite books, and I desperately wanted to tell UKL that this was the case, and to thank her for a billion pages of reading and ideas. But I didn't, and I think it was the right call. But we shared a sunset together, which is kind of ... like something she might write.

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.
What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/LeftHandMillsCollege.html

“Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.

—The Creation of Éa”

No words

chapter 1 of her Tao Te Ching translation:

The way you can go
isn't the real way.
The name you can say
isn't the real name.

Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name's the mother
of the ten thousand things.

So the unwanting soul
sees what's hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.

Two things, one origin,
but different in name,
whose identity is a mystery.
Mystery of all mysteries!
The door to the hidden.

Most idiotic hot take, which I had to rant about on twitter because it was so, so stupid:

Today, in 'The fact that I admit I don't know what I'm talking about, am almost diametrically wrong about what I'm saying, and am about to draw a ludicrous and specious comparison will not prevent me from tweeting something stupid': pic.twitter.com/gxrxHZAwHY

— Caustic Cover Critic (@Unwise_Trousers) January 24, 2018

Wow what a take that is

well, excretions can also be hot so

I AM MAD ABOUT MY THING SO I AM GOING TO SHIT ON YOUR THING

twitter, forever and always

lol it so totally figures that the king of shitty hot takes, clickbait hack noah berlatsky, chimed in to support that horrible tweet

RIP. No-one i would rather re-read, and I still have a good few to discover for the first time.

I've always found her a difficult read, but wanna persevere. Is the first Earthsea a place to start?

Yes. Or "The Rule of Names."

The trailer to the long in the works documentary is here:

https://vimeo.com/268831999

Per io9:

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is set to premiere at the Sheffield Doc/Fest on June 10, followed by a series of US festival visits and eventually a digital release online. Curry also revealed on Kickstarter that the documentary will be broadcast on PBS American Masters sometime in 2019.

Just finished Tehanu. Bleak, but perfect for me, and for right now. It's really quite a feat to go from epic to intimate and have it feel liberating rather than anticlimactic.

Ursula K Le Guin's house is for sale! If we club together we could probably afford it, right?

https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/real-estate-news/article245407450.html

lets do it

I am good with this approach.

Holy wow that home is glorious.

wish i was always coming home to there.

omg yes please let’s do this

I don't think this will work out the way you hope, Laura.
Oh social media. pic.twitter.com/49m1UWnVzl

— Ursula K. Le Guin (@ursulakleguin) December 8, 2020

Awesome.

We are delighted to announce that the 33rd stamp in the US Postal Service Literary Arts series honors Ursula. Stamp release will be later this year, date TBD. From then on, all our letters will be three ounces! Thank you @USPS for this distinction. https://t.co/jGboi8i5LU pic.twitter.com/8H3UOGafPv

— Ursula K. Le Guin (@ursulakleguin) January 15, 2021

Gorgeous

And as I've been muttering elsewhere -- while I'm not positive this is the first US stamp to feature a nonbinary figure, that background scene is obv Left Hand of Darkness and thus features Estraven, so.

Yes, I was just admiring that illustration of Ai and Estraven. Really nice work.

so cool

I’m reading Tombs of Atuan with my son right now and that book is a god damn masterpiece.

You spend almost half the book just living in Arha’s rhythms, feeling the texture of her world and understanding what structures it it: the boundaries of fear and ritual. You have the sensation of a society living on just the husk of an unremembered time. The living drama of humanity has moved on from this place yet we are centred on it. (It’s like the US Senate!) What scriptwriters call “the inciting incident” comes a good third of the book’s length too late, by today’s standards, but what you gain is a recognition of its gravity. Plus it’s goth as shit. It really is astounding. Once the motor of the story picks up its pace all the weight of that long opening gives an inertial force to events that is just awesome. Honestly - the first book - Wizard of Earthsea - is very good, but it follows a fairly traditional structure. And the elements are not very surprising. It’s told masterfully of course, but you know, you’ve got a wizard’s school and some dragons and a hot-headed protagonist. This though - this is really something else. The intensity of it is frankly almost overwhelming.

There’s so much in there about freedom and breaking free of stultifying tradition and whether it’s possible to cast off beliefs you were inculcated with, and how morality intersects with these questions, and how you sometimes need to take the biggest risk you can take, and how an act of kindness - even made without really realising it - can open up your whole heart and change your whole life

booming and otm

All very true. But also underscores why Tehanu is even MORE impressive.