Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

So good, so far

So Far So Good by Ursula K LeGuin

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I’ve never really gotten poetry or Ursula K LeGuin. I have nothing against either, they just weren’t for me… until So Far So Good, LeGuin’s last work. I knew signing up for a reading challenge would take me outside of my reading comfort zone, which is fine. Outside of my comfort zone is rarely uncomfortable (with reading). The worst is usually just uninteresting, the best is a bigger comfort zone. The challenge (storygraph’s 2025 genre challenge) was a nature poetry collection and I have enough […]

A lot of snow out of one cloud, and it grows thicker.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin

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Some of book reviews in CBR have been a trip to the memory lane. This is no exception. When I think of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, I’m transported back to next library of my life, the central library of my childhood town. No more small branch library, welcome the main library. I was in the big league now. Well, relatively speaking: even in a library and education friendly Finland a small town’s main library in the mid-1980s is still heavily constrained […]

Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew

Steering the Craft by Ursula K. LeGuin

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For the last ten years, I’ve heard  this book on writing by the grand dame of fantasy and science fiction is the book every writer should have in his or her back pocket; however, I found it disappointing. Perhaps if I’d read this book at the start of my writing journey, I’d have found it much more helpful. Plus, it’s largely a workbook with writing exercises on various elements such as punctuation, sentence length, syntax, and other rules of good writing which a beginning creative […]

I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame.

Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin

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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.

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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.

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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 […]



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