No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Wit and Wisdom and Daily Life Who wouldn’t want to read a selection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most interesting blog entries? That’s what No Time to Spare (2017) is. After a fine introduction by Karen Jay Fowler that explains how Le Guin got into blogging late in her life, the book presents the entries, which range thematically rather than chronologically from 2010 to 2016, in the following sections: Going Over 80 (on aging), The Lit Biz (on fan letters, awards, the great American novel, utopia/dystopia, Homer, etc.), Trying to Make Sense of It (on gender, politics, economics, uniforms, exorcism, childhood, anger, belief, etc.), and Rewards (on opera, theater, her recently deceased fan-letter-answering-assistant and friend, soft-boiled eggs, her Christmas tree, the Portland foodbank, a rattlesnake, a lynx, and the Oregon high desert), and—in three different interludes—The Annals of Pard (on the antics of her last cat). Le Guin’s wise and witty mind and pleasurable and precise use of language are on display in her blog entries. She likes to take some perceived conventional wisdom and then skewer it or correct it, as she does with sayings like, “You’re only as old as you think you are,” or “the Great American Novel,” or “fantasy is escape.” Even when she’s talking about something like aging, she is liable at any moment to insert a tart opinion or keen perspective on things like the American Dream, gender, or writing. And in her blog entries she prefers asking questions to answering them, as with her suggestion that we find a better metaphor for economics than constant unrestrained growth (which sounds to her like cancer) or as with her wondering whether it’s possible to find a constructive use for anger or to join a male institution like the military as a woman without being coopted by it. Anyone who has read and loved Le Guin’s great work like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or the Earthsea series would get a great, warm, provocative kick out of her blog entries (though I suppose you could also just go to her official website and read them there!). The audiobook reader Barbara Caruso is pretty much just right, a seasoned woman with the intellect and emotion to enhance Le Guin’s experiences and opinions and insights, though her voice gets a bit high when she’s emphasizing key words, a quality that at times rubbed me the wrong way (it may be a matter of taste). This collection is some of the last writing that Le Guin did near the end of her long career, and it reveals some details of her daily life and many examples of her independent mind and heart. It ends on a sublime note, as with fine poetic and vivid nature writing Le Guin describes the high Oregon desert and its flora and fauna, like when she describes some vultures in flight, “quiet lords of the warm towers of the air,” and then a flock of black birds, “flowing down and away . . . and into the reeds and across the air in a single flickering particulate wave. What is entity?” View all my reviews
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