Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The cover makes the book look more exciting than it is

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I know that Ursula K. Le Guin is a big name in influential fantasy authors, especially for children’s and YA.  And I’d never read anything by her, so I figured that I should.  A Wizard of Earthsea is the classic hero’s journey with wizards and magic and dragons and all sorts of other stuff.  What more could you ask for?   Apparently a lot.  I was bored!  Partly due to the story, and partly because of the language. It felt stuffy.  I think she was […]

Two pieces of yesterday were in Captain Davidson’s mind when he woke, and he lay looking at them in the darkness for a while.

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K Le Guin

The Telling by Ursula K Le Guin

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The Word for World is Forest: 3/5 Stars A novella from 1972 and part of the Hainish cycle, this book tells the story of a human colony sent to an arboreal world to strip all the resources from it. They are commanded by a human explorer extraordinaire (who is characterized and portrayed in a very 19th century American sensibility of absolute dominance over the landscape and the people who live there). We come across the colony as they are about to receive a “shipment” of […]

Getting my nerd card revoked

Unlocking the Air by Ursula K. Le Guin

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You guuuuuuys, I feel terrible, but I did NOT enjoy this. The writing is, of course, incredible. It’s amazing how quickly Le Guin can set a scene and sketch out a character. Even the stories that were only a few pages long had an incredibly clear snapshot of a person or a setting. She can make a character feel real with only a few paragraphs. However. They’re not real stories, which is what my brain had been expecting. A lot of them are completely aimless […]

Well, hell, I still don’t know what the perfect society looks like

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

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CBR11bingo: Award Winner – Nebula Award for Best Novel (1974), Hugo Award for Best Novel (1975), Locus Award for Best Novel (1975) Double Bingo! Horizontal: I Love This, Not My Wheelhouse, Listicle, Rainbow Flag, Award Winner Vertical: Reading the TBR, Science!, History/Schmistory, Award Winner, Summer Read Last year I read my first Le Guin Novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, and couldn’t stop raving about it. On the advice of a fellow Cannonballer, I decided to read The Dispossessed for my Award Winner Square (tip for next […]

Left wanting more… (and hooray – this completes two bingo lines!)

The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K Le Guin

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CBR11 Bingo- Birthday   I had to find a square for my girl Le Guin on this bingo card, and fortunately her birthday was October 21, so that was an easy pick 🙂 I’ve had The Eye of the Heron  on my TBR list for a while, and this seemed like a perfect time to pick it up. I love Le Guin not only because of her writing itself, but for the fact that she is one of the truly great female fantasy/sci-fi writers. Even when […]

Could Not Get Into This One: DNF at 25 Percent

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I tried. Really. I hate it when I don’t get into a classic. I have been told for years that I should read Ursula K. Le Guin and how much I would like her and maybe I should just try something else. This book didn’t make any sense to me. I kept reading words and going what in the world does this mean? And some of the sentences/paragraphs felt overly written. I just finally decided that I wasn’t enjoying it and moved on to another […]



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