Words Are My Matter: Writings about Life and Books, 2000-2015, with a Journal of a Writer's Week | 
Omg I did it, I finished a physical book! First one this year, though I've still been reading lots of ebooks and audiobooks.
I savoured this one and enjoyed being back with LeGuin's intelligent, wonderful writing so much. This was good for my brain.
The Left Hand of Darkness
pickLe Guin's nonfiction is a delight to read. It was interesting seeing such a wide span of writing intents packed into one book. In the book review essays section, I didn't know most of the books she wrote about, but it was still fun reading each one. #Nonfiction
Used for #GottaCatchEmAll Farfetch'd "neutral colored cover" (the audiobook cover is mostly brown) @PuddleJumper
And #OwlHouseReadathon Lily "someone loves history or architecture"
picki love le guin and she goes IN on some shid in here, but its always a bummer to read a collection of someones thoughts from the same type of publication from the same decade span of time, because they do tend to repeat themselves. the points she makes are brilliant and shes perfect, but read over a longer spam, and savor it
pickI have a confession. I have only read Le Guin's non-fiction, her other writing has never really clicked with me. But her hoo boy do I like her essays and her writing in these little books. My favorite has been The Wave in the Mind, and this one shares a few essays in the beginning. This one also has more book reviews, which I'm maybe not that keen on, but let's face it, Le Guin can pretty much write about anything and make it interesting.
After my wonderful Easter holiday and Readathon, returning to real world has reaaaally been kicking my butt. I miss having freedom to just read, read, read.
But at least I've been able to continue reading Le Guin and that does ease up some of my misery. I've already read her No Time To Spare and The Wave In the Mind, both stellar, so I'm happy to have more treats to nibble at.
pickI enjoyed the talks and essays, and her writing journal, very much; my enjoyment of the book as a whole would have been greater had there been more of these and fewer book reviews. However, I might have felt differently about that if I were familiar with more of the books in question. (I did note a few to look up later.) The overall impression I've come away with is that I would have liked her as a person, as well as for her writing.
Not sure where this LeGuin quote is from but it was lovely and drawn on my local indies chalk board. Always feels great to celebrate reading.
Readers aren‘t viewers; they recognize their pleasure as different than being entertained...reading is active, an act of attention, of observed alertness...In its silence, a book is a challenge...It won‘t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it. (This explains a lot of why since reading again, I do not enjoy TV.)
pickI've finished it and I miss her. I don't know what to say.
I needed to spend some time with my friend Ursula, so I picked this up. I so enjoy the way she thought, the way she wrote. She will never stop being a gift.
I wrote a blog post about what she taught me about fear, and how to deal with it: https://breathesbooks.com/2018/01/24/turn-around/
Fuuuuuuuck
Why fiction matters 🙌🏻 #praiseursula (thanks for the recommendation @River_Voice ❤️)
1. Anything new by Ursula K LeGuin, Bloodline (kinda old, but I want it!).
2. Whatever, I‘m not too picky.
3.I‘d love to get my son and I a couple of funkos (StarWars). Otherwise, all of it.
4. Greens, Blues, Purples
5. Not real into the splatter.
Here's Ursula K Le Guin again. (I promise not to post a quote from every page!)
This one has been on my TBR stack for a while. (I keep forgetting about my Kindle books ?.)
Every time writing or art-making has to be "justified" as a transferable skill, of use in business, my heart sinks and I wonder how come I ended up here and now and not in a scriptorium in the Dark Ages.
I've been hoarding books and not reading them again!! When you work in a library and have no late fines, this tends to happen. All these are going back tomorrow... unread. I'll add them to my to-read list and check them out responsibly like a person who doesn't want to stress themselves out.
#dnf #tbr #library #litsyloveslibraries #bookhoarding
The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.
Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.
A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well.
There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don‘t understand. And incomprehension is boredom.
I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.
Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and convention subject matter. Re-Fi is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had self-respect they'd be writing memoir, but they're too lazy to fact-check..Re-Fi is an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on 1 species, full of worn-out cliches and predictable situations
In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order.
I'm sure Tolkien knew that The Secret Vice was masturbation. This amuses me.
So true, especially right now!
My goal for 2017 is to actually post on Litsy again, and specifically to record my Book Riot read harder challenge books. I'm starting off with Words Are My Matter, a book about books, because Le Guin will never steer you wrong.
pickLoved this, especially the first section of essays. LeGuin is one of those gifted souls who can do it all--fiction, poetry, essays.
My current from-the-library stack.
