For those of you playing along at home, I set myself a goal of reading all of the books I own which I haven't read yet. There are 252 of them, so I have my work cut out for me.
Trips to the library are not helpful in attaining this goal; alas, the first book I read in March (after the ones I've already talked about from my vacation) came from the library. It was Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXI, a collection of fantasy short stories with female protagonists. I liked quite a few of them (Lee Martindale's "Necessity and The Mother" about an inn run by ex-mercenaries was my fave). This was mostly in the interest of research; they are accepting admissions for Volume XXII and I wanted to see if the story I'm working on fits in or not. It's sort of a faux-Sumerian setting, and these are largely European, but not exclusively. Well, we'll see how it goes. From the stand point of a reader and not a writer, this was enough of a taste where I'm curious to read the first 20 volumes. I shall abstain; I have 252 books to read first, right?So I'm a huge fan of Ursula K. LeGuin. I've read the Earthsea novels over and over, and her books on writing are a constant resource for me. I'm particularly fond of the Tao te Ching she did (I have quite a collection of Tao te Ching translations, and they are all a bit different. Of course the multiplicity is itself a rather tao thing. The Tao that can be translated is not the true Tao...). I've been remiss with her sci-fi, though. I did buy nearly all of her sci-fi novels over a couple of Christmases (ah, gift cards), and I read The Left Hand of Darkness (still my fave, actually, for sentimental reasons. Which means it made me cry, and books generally don't do that to me). I got halfway through this one:
Worlds of Exile and Illusion, but stopped for some reason, then got all distracted with Miles Vorkosigan books (and there are a ton of those, and they get better as you go so there's no stopping until you're done). So the first thing up was to finish this off. It's actually an omnibus of three short novels: Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions. They're minor works from her, really, but they all had touches I liked. The sci-fi version of the faery story in RW, where the woman goes under the mountain and what seems like an evening to her is decades to the rest of the world when she returns (because she was travelling at relativistic speeds); the years-long winter of PofE; the taoist ideas which culiminate in the MC becoming two people and yet one at the end of CofI (I liked that one the best).Still, if you want to see what LeGuin can really do, start here:
From a nonemotional point of view, I would say this is a better book than Left Hand of Darkness (although, as I mentioned, that's still my fave, what with the crying and with the wintery landscapes. I bet you never knew I loved wintery landscapes...). Certainly it made me feel completely inadequate as a writer. There are so many ideas here. She blends physics, politics, and philosophy together, and she does it with real, human characters who are not cardboard cut-outs fronting for various ideologies. I don't like utopia stories, and I seldom like dystopia stories; they are often just novelizations of straw man arguments. This is not that. There is ambiguity here. If the anarchists on Anarres have a utopia, it is one that requires its members to constantly fight against the pitfalls that group dynamics will inevitably fall into (although I'm suddenly intrigued - what would a pro-bureaucracy novel look like?)(Monkeying around on Wikipedia led me to a new phrase "libertarian socialist". I've never heard of such a group. The human ability to divide groups into subgroups and sub-subgroups never ceases to amaze me).
Next up: The Word for World is Forest. I've always adored this title; apparently it wasn't LeGuin's choice. She called it Little Green Men, which actually fits the story better. And yet the title it has now (which Harlan Ellison came up with, from a line in the book) is so evocative, it would be a tough call. This one is very short, I think technically a novella. The ending is killer. I managed to convince my husband to read it (if you knew how little he reads these days, you'd appreciate what that means; I think it helps that this is so short).It's not hard to see that this is a book about the Viet Nam War, but I didn't find it dated at all. I'm almost ashamed to admit, but I liked the character of Davidson. Now, if I met this guy in real life, I wouldn't have such positive feelings, but as a character he's really a guy that lives in his own skin, if you know what I mean. And the way his self-delusion builds as the story continues is quite a trip to read.
Last Book: The Telling. This one is basically a thinly veiled novelization of the last century of Chinese history, when the People's Republic of China took over. The old ways are outlawed, there is a push for one unifying language and an alphabetic writing system. There were a lot of little touches I liked: the way everyone pretends to like coffee because they're supposed to, the library in the caves high up in the mountains. But in the end this is a book I admired without really engaging in it much. I might have had a different impression if I hadn't read it right after The Dispossessed and The Word for World is Forest. It was good, but not great.I thought I might just be Ursula'd out, but then I started the book I'm reading now, The Lathe of Heaven and knew from page 1 that was definitely not the problem. "...as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea." See my arm? Goosebumps.
So the tally at the end of the month (and I have it on an XCel spreadsheet because I am such a geek): I now have 249 books left to go. *sigh* Yes, a couple of books sneaked in the door so I didn't net much. Still, there's always April and six more LeGuin books to go. I'm debating where to go next: Diana Wynne Jones or William Gibson?
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