Great writing on a great writer!! LeGuin has been a "north star" for me for most of my life. As great a critic as she was a writer, I discovered most of my favorite Sci-Fi and Fantasy from LeGuin cosigns-- Samuel Delany, Mercedes Lackey, Robert Holdstock, Michael Moorcock and Gene Wolfe chief among them. When I first read Earthsea in sixth grade, I was enamored by the sense of melancholy that permeated the world. Upon return, I find all of them to be profoundly sad and beautifully written. Something I really love about her work, both Earthsea and Catwings, is her trust in the vocabulary and reading comprehension of young people. So much YA is literally unreadable on a sentence level, with writers and publishers alike cynically reasoning that children don't know any better, but LeGuin (and Brian Jacques and a few others) were able to write beautiful sentences for children.
I need to finally read this series! We read The Left Hand of Darkness in my favorite undergraduate class: Science Fiction and Globalization. The books we read, the movies we watched, my professor and fellow students will stay with me always. I always thought that reading a lot as child (especially a child who was cloistered from the world and had an emotionally unsafe home life, as many do) made me more empathetic. Reading was definitely an escape for me. But I’ll have to reevaluate what I believe after this essay.
Great writing on a great writer!! LeGuin has been a "north star" for me for most of my life. As great a critic as she was a writer, I discovered most of my favorite Sci-Fi and Fantasy from LeGuin cosigns-- Samuel Delany, Mercedes Lackey, Robert Holdstock, Michael Moorcock and Gene Wolfe chief among them. When I first read Earthsea in sixth grade, I was enamored by the sense of melancholy that permeated the world. Upon return, I find all of them to be profoundly sad and beautifully written. Something I really love about her work, both Earthsea and Catwings, is her trust in the vocabulary and reading comprehension of young people. So much YA is literally unreadable on a sentence level, with writers and publishers alike cynically reasoning that children don't know any better, but LeGuin (and Brian Jacques and a few others) were able to write beautiful sentences for children.
I need to finally read this series! We read The Left Hand of Darkness in my favorite undergraduate class: Science Fiction and Globalization. The books we read, the movies we watched, my professor and fellow students will stay with me always. I always thought that reading a lot as child (especially a child who was cloistered from the world and had an emotionally unsafe home life, as many do) made me more empathetic. Reading was definitely an escape for me. But I’ll have to reevaluate what I believe after this essay.