Over the break, I went on a bit of an Ursula K. Le Guin binge, inspired by my mom who had brought a copy of The Lathe of Heaven with her when she came to visit. Of the four books I read, The Lathe of Heaven and City of Illusions were best.
The Lathe of Heaven was especially fun becaues it takes place in my hometown (Portland, Oregon)—but in several different versions of Portland corresponding to different timelines. Le Guin explores something here that is not seen often enough in American fiction: the righteousness and heroism of the frail.
For City of Illusions, I have written a longer review here, It Is Wrong To Take Life: language & mockery in the Shing era, which I excerpt below:
The narrative perspective of City of Illusions is that only a race in which killing runs deep could conceive of an absolute Law against all killing; and the Shing do things worse than killing anyway, like erasing people’s memory or letting people kill each other. Thus reassured of the hypocrisy and essential falseness of the Shing, we can get on with the “liberation” of all the Earth’s species from Laws that go against the true natural order, which is (naturally) that animals who cannot speak Man’s languages must serve Man in the the only form intelligible to his insatiable appetite: protein, blood, and fat.
(It Is Wrong To Take Life: language & mockery in the Shing era, The Jon Sterling Review of Books)