In memoriam: Ursula K. Le Guin

There are a lot of writers whose work I love, and collect without thinking or checking reviews, because I know that whatever they write will be something I want to read. There are a fair number if writers whose work I keep coming back to, rereading, exploring, for many reasons. In some sense, you coukd say that all of these writers are favourites. But if you asked me who is my favourite writer, and made me pick just one, it would be Le Guin.

It wasn’t just her work, which was some of the best fiction, not just speculative fiction, written in the past 100 years. It was what she wrote about and how she thought about what she wrote, and how she lived what she wrote. She was an inspiration, as a feminist, as a political thinker, as a human being. She did an amazing thing, something you don’t often see geniuses do. She questioned herself. She interrogated her thought and her work. She was open to finding that she had been wrong, and to showing us all how her understanding had changed. She was never afraid to learn, and relearn, and learn more. She never rested on her laurels. And in that, as in so much else, she still has so much to teach us.

Goodbye, Ursula, and fair travels.

Wednesday book post

Trying to make Wednesday Book posts a thing again. I want to make more use of Dreamwidth, I’m too much on FB, I think.

So. Books finished in the past week:

Theodora Goss, The Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter
Nancy Kress, Tomorrow’s Kin
Farah Mendlesohn, Spring Flowering
Nancy Kress, Yesterday’s Kin
Tade ​Thompson, ​The ​Murders ​of ​Molly ​Southbourne
JYYang, The Black Tides of Heaven
JY Yang, The Red Threads of Fortune
Kate Harding, Asking for It
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker, All the Real Indians Died Off

Books I’m currently reading:

Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki
Homintern, Gregory Woods
Tender, Sofia Samatar
Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, Barbara Gurr (ed.)
Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014, Ursula Le Guin
Amatka, Karin Tidbeck
The Fire This Time, Jessmyn Ward (ed.)
Lethal ​Decisions: ​The ​Unnecessary ​Deaths ​of ​Women ​and ​Children ​from ​HIV/AIDS, Arthur Ammann

Next on the list:

Who knows? I want to get some more Hugo reading done, so maybe Jemisen’s The Stone Sky, Victor Lavalle’s The Changeling, Rivers Soloman’s An Unkindness of Ghosts, or Malka Older’s Null States. Might try catching up on Laurie King’s Mary Russell series. Or reread some Le Guin that I haven’t read for a while. I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction in recent months, I might be feeling more like some fiction for a while.