Welcome to Litsy!

It's a story. Early in her writing career, so I am looking forward to getting into her more mature writings.

A day late for #weirdwords but I have two entries courtesy of a recent search of the tagged book, one of the selections on my #ALSpine list. According to Wikipedia, “ It was published in 1966 as an Ace Double, along with Avram Davidson's The Kar-Chee Reign, following the tête-bêche format.“ Looking at tête-bêche, I find dos-à-dos binding, or back to back binding (an example of which is pictured).
Tête-bêche (or head-to-toe) (cont)

I‘m loving these UKLG scifi/fantasy mashups, and I‘m happy I started with this polarizing early novel. Faster-than-light travel (for non-life forms anyway), an epic quest and journey, and flying cats as steeds, all put together with a thoroughly modern anthropological sensibility? So good. I think I‘ve heard that le guin regretted mashing scifi and fantasy together, but it‘s more common now and this book feels foundational. #aam

More fantasy than sci-fi, this book seems to have its roots in Middle Earth. There are creatures that resemble dwarves, elves, ring wraiths, and even hobbits. Nonetheless, the story, even with the fantasy elements, does have a sci-fi flair. Here is the basis for the Ekumen, the ansible, and NAFAL (nearly as fast as light) travel. In other words, the fantasy and sci-fi work side by side to make something quite unique. Overall, I enjoyed this.

Another great Ursula K. LeGuin book that I loved. Second book in the Hainish novels already lined up.

With this I am happy to announce my first ever #BookSpinBingo completed in the actual month when supposed to. Yay!

Also the month with the most reads, a record for me that I will probably never break: 11 books. Thank you for making all this possible, @TheAromaOfBooks!

It was ok, but I prefer her sci-fi works... This one is more of a fantasy one.

I am re-reading the Hainish tales of LeGuin, starting with Rocannon's World. I had quite forgotten how much detail she packed into this relatively thin volume. It had adventure, tragedy, menace and redemption, all great ingredients for a good story. What I most enjoy is that it is part of a much larger storyline. LeGuin delivers, as always.

I love my old paperbacks of Ursula LeGuin‘s books! Each of these books is under 200 pages. And they are all quite distinctly different from one another; City of Exile is Science Fic (about overcoming tremendous adversity by joining forces), Rocannon‘s World is also SF, but as always with UKL it‘s never about that, The Beginning Place is pure Fantasy, & Very Far Away is a beautiful YA coming of age story. Try one! You won‘t regret it! #MarchInBooks

Early work by the author. Still a great work but less overt in the themes that make her later books masterpieces.