Ursula K. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In the last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined. The collected best of Ursula’s blog, No Time to Spare presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”
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Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
I’ll be honest: this wasn’t exactly a voluntary pick. I usually never choose books like this for myself, being a fiction lover all the way, but as things go, it was an accidental selection from the NYPL ebooks page. I’d been impatiently looking for Wizard of Earthsea for weeks, saw a Le Guin book scroll by, and without thinking, checked it out. Then I opened it up and – surprise, it was actually a collection of her blog posts from the later years of her life! Quarantine being what it is, I gave it a shot and settled in.
Rose over at Novels & Teacups recently posted this book tag and it seems so fun! I liked reading her answers, and now here are mine below…
Would you rather read an amazing book with a disappointing ending, or a book that is lackluster but gets really good at the end?
I have to go with the amazing book with a disappointing ending. At least the majority of the book still holds up! Who wants to suffer through a majority-bad book just to get to the good stuff? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I was a voracious reader as a kid, but there were some notable books and series that somehow slipped by me – we couldn’t always afford new copies so my reading was limited to my school library and whatever we picked up at local yard sales (a surprisingly great source of books, and usually only 50 cents each at the time!). And so while I had a pretty wide variety of books under my belt, these were three that I never got around to reading and wish I had…
One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.
As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients’ lives — a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys — she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.
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Rating: 4 out of 5.
What a great read! Lori Gottlieb is a columnist for the New York Times and The Atlantic (she’s the therapist in their Ask a Therapist series); I’ve been loosely following her writings there for a while and have always really appreciated her intelligence and empathy, so when she came out with a full-length book about being a therapist and going to therapy herself, I knew it had to be interesting.
I love book social media. Blogs, bookstagram, Twitter, the book subreddit…you name it, I’m on it and I love interacting with the different communities and seeing what everyone’s reading. Inevitably, though, each community tends to flock around the same handful of books – bookstagram’s always looking for the next trendy read and has It Books of the moment like Circe or Three Women, while /r/books tends to be more scifi/fantasy focused and has favorites like The Hitchhiker’s Guide and Master and the Margarita.
Sometimes they become a bit like echo chambers as people repeatedly recommend the same books, so I appreciate this prompt for reminding us to highlight great books that don’t get discussed as much. So below, three books I read or reread in the past year and enjoyed immensely.
The Starless Sea is a love letter to books and readers, a masterpiece of stories within a story where fables of pirates and princesses converge with the saga of Zachary Ezra Rawlins, the son of a fortune teller.
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Rating: 2 out of 5.
Unpopular opinion: I didn’t like this book much at all.
When I read The Night Circus, I was absolutely entranced by the world Morgenstern had created – I love fantasy and read plenty of it, and yet I don’t think I’d encountered anything like her writing before. Were there were some imperfections? Of course. You could call out her characters for being a little flat and the plot not quite satisfying at the end, but those paled in comparison to the imagination of her traveling circus.
Sadly, even her world building couldn’t make up for the flaws in The Starless Sea.
This pandemic is affecting all of us differently, and I hope with all of my heart everyone is safe and healthy, no matter where you are. Be gentle with yourself during this time. It’s ok to be anxious or stressed.
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been in quarantine for 6 weeks now, going into week 7. The virus has hit NYC hard. My office started WFH a little earlier than most, which was reassuring and appreciated, but also means I’ve been stir crazy a little longer than most 🙂 I’m not usually an anxious person, but these days I always find myself stressed about something, so I’ve been trying to take my advice and be generous and gentle with myself. Like giving myself a break from my constant need to be productive. Letting myself feel any anger or frustration or anxiety. Even binge-playing Animal Crossing for hours (does anyone else here play? Let’s be friends!).
While everyone seems to be baking bread or doing plenty of quarantine cooking otherwise, I’ve picked up yoga. I’d never particularly enjoyed it before, but now I’m finding my daily practice incredibly soothing and meditative. I’m hoping to continue it even after our lockdown lifts.
Some quarantine reading…
My reading has been a little distracted lately, but four books I’ve finished are:
Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah – Really enjoyed this! I wrote up a review here.
The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern – So, so disappointing.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb – This was a great read. I like reading her columns in NYTimes and The Atlantic, and her book was hard to put down.
No Time to Spare, by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s writing never fails to impress me. This was my first exposure to her nonfiction work and she’s a startlingly lucid, eloquent writer!
Have you read anything good recently? I’d love to hear any quarantine routines you’ve started as well.
Mossflower Cove 