It takes three books to officially make it a theme, yeah? Amazon pushed Ursula LeGuin’s Lavinia at me after I finished Song of Achilles and Circe, and it fit perfectly in my left-side-takes-on-mythology streak. LeGuin plucks Lavinia, the last wife of Trojan refugee Aeneas, from a single mention in Virgil’s poem and crafts a world around her. In her hands, Lavinia comes alive as a beloved daughter of a beloved king who marries a foreigner and becomes a mother of Rome. Lavinia comes of age […]
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
CBR10Bingo – Birthday! (Ursula LeGuin October 21) To paraphrase Octavia Butler is talking about her novel “Survivor,” her book she kind of abandoned to out of print status: it was her Star Trek novel. This means that ultimately what she felt was happening in that novel was too conceit-heavy, too tropey, and too much about discovery of a weird alien race and then turning into a kind of hackneyed sci fi Golden Age schlock. In the two first Hain novels, there’s a kind of teetering […]
There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
I generally enjoy Ursula K Leguin…in that I like her writing more than I don’t. And that more or less explains my feelings for this one. It started off very slowly and meh-ly for me….in fact I stopped part way through and read different books. But then toward the end, as we started getting closer to the meat and the explanation in the novel I really got into it. This is one of her Hainish novels, but the setup and delivery could very well take […]