LeGuin, Ursula K. Books - Page 3

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Read it if only for the last story 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

The final story in this book, "Another Story," is almost certainly my favorite short story ever, and I've read a lot of them. Her writing is wonderful, and a lot of the best elements of both her writing and usual themes come together wonderfully in the final story. The other ones are worth reading, too, but the final story stands on its own and is alone worth finding this book now that it is, sadly, out of print. (I found two copies in a bookstore's bargain stack 6 year ago, luckily for me!)

Find the book, and at least read the last story. It's truly wonderful.

Editorial Review:

The winner of the Pushcart Prize, the Kafka Award, and the National Book Award, Ursula K. Le Guin has created a profound and transformational literature. The award-winning stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea range from the everyday to the outer limits of experience, where the quantum uncertainties of space and time are resolved only in the depths of the human heart. Astonishing in their diversity and power, they exhibit both the artistry of a major writer at the height of her powers and the humanity of a mature artist confronting the world with her gift of wonder still intact.

Jane On Her Own (Catwings)

Ursula Le Guin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Jane On Her Own 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

It's about Jane Tabby who is tired and bored being cooped up in the barn and never getting to go out in the world and have adventures and be free. So she goes out into the city and finds out the hard way that being fancy isn't what she wants. What she really wants is to be happy, free, AND live in a cozy home. She was cooped up in the city too. In the end, she finds all three.

Jane On Her Own 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Jane On Her Own, is a book about six cats that all have wings except one. There mother did not have wings. Jane was the yongest out of Thelma, Roger, Harriet, James, and there friend Alexander Furby. Jane got sick of the old farm and traveled to the big city. She met a man named Poppa he kept her in cages and made her do tricks for strange people. Finly Jane escaped and went to see her mother who also lived in the city. That night she squeezed though the window and got on the bed and layed next to her mom. The next morning Sarah Wolf had wocken to see a beautiful black cat with wings. She was very nice to Jane, Sarah evan left the window open for if Jane wanted to leve. Jane would something leve and go see Alexander Furby and have long chats and then fly back to the city. Jane Became a free cat.

Editorial Review:

When Jane, a cat with wings, leaves the safety of her farm to explore the world, she falls into the hands of a man who keeps her prisoner and exploits her for money. Full-color illustrations.

Always Coming Home (California Fiction)

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

It's Hard to Know What I Think 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

On the one hand, I agree with all the good things other reviewers have mentioned. On the other hand, I also agree with all the bad things.

The cultures in the book struck me not so much as "simple" but as "simplistic." I think I was also really bothered by the lack of enough story to illuminate the practices of the society. The story parts were great. The poetry parts frequently drove me up the wall (true also of my reading of Tolkein). It was choppy, which made it difficult to read without the concentration one reserves for *actual* archaeological study.

I think in the end that might have been my biggest problem with it. I wanted to read about a world that never was, a world that might be, a world of people different from me. Instead, I was stuck reading fake archaeology. I was uncomfortable with the in-between-ness of it - I either wanted real archaeology, or real fiction, not a mishmash of the two. The book is incredibly self-indulgent of the author; what saves it is that LeGuin is so phenominally gifted that even her self-indulgence is interesting and well-written.

It was compelling (in places) and maddeningly dull (in places). I think I'm glad I read it - but I'm not sure - and I don't think I'll read it again - but I'm not sure.

I'm sorry this isn't a more coherent review. It's hard for me to know if the problem was mine, or the book's. A very strange, in-between book that left me in a strange, in-between place.

In sum: Very well written, very unique book, that left me very ambivalent about whether it was "worth it" as a reader.

Editorial Review:

Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home is a major work of the imagination from one of America's most respected writers of science fiction. More than five years in the making, it is a novel unlike any other. A rich and complex interweaving of story and fable, poem, artwork, and music, it totally immerses the reader in the culture of the Kesh, a peaceful people of the far future who inhabit a place called the Valley on the Northern Pacific Coast.

Wonderful Alexander And The Catwing (Catwings Tales (Topeka Bindery))

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Top-notch children's literature 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is the first in the catwings series my 4-year old and I have read together. We plan to read the 4-volume set! The plot and characters are highly imaginative; and LeGuin's keen observations of animal behavior bring the story to life. The detailed, realistic drawings that appear on nearly every page are beautiful and enjoyable, and keep my pre-school daughter's interest in the story, even though she may not grasp some of the more complex prose. LeGuin does not spare the reader realism--this is not a candy-coated story--but I believe even very young children appreciate honest portrayals of life's challenges. My daughter asks that I tell her the catwings story after lights out--we have even made up our own chapters.

Editorial Review:

Wonderful Alexander, the kitten who is the biggest, stongest, and loudest in his family, thinks he is destined for wonderful things. No sooner has he set out to explore on his own than he is chased up a tree and stuck there. His rescuer, Jane, a black kitten with wings, leads him to her home, where Alexander meets the other Catwings.

Alexander soon learns how he can repay Jane, who has been so wonderful to him. He helps Jane confront her greatest fear.

The First Men in the Moon (Modern Library Classics)

H.G. Wells

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Social commentary and great adventure! 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Mr Bedford, a recently bankrupt Victorian gentleman has retired to the English countryside to recover his spirit and write a play. He meets Dr Cavor, an eccentric, quaintly comical scientific genius researching the preparation of a compound he calls "Cavorite" that will be opaque to all radiation including gravity. When a laboratory error results in the wildly successful early completion of the Cavorite project, Bedord and Cavor use it to create a sphere that is capable of travel to the moon.

The science in HG Wells' "First Men in the Moon" is now known to be wildly off the mark - anti-gravity; a lunar atmosphere that freezes during the frigid lunar night and sublimates into a rarified but breathable air during the warmer day; an extraordinarily fecund flora that seeds itself, germinates, grows, blooms and completes its life cycle during the brief sunlight hours; and a civilized but strictly class structured lunar insect-like people living under the moon's surface that Bedord and Cavor called "Selenites".

Despite its failings in the light of current scientific knowledge, "First Men in the Moon" is still an enjoyable adventure written in typical late Victorian style that gives us an early taste of 20th century science fiction space opera to follow. Just as he did in his better known novel "The Time Machine", Wells successfully uses his protagonists, Bedord and Cavor, as tools to discuss, satirize and critique deeply and dearly held British notions of class and imperialism.

Suspending your belief and accepting the science in terms of what was known and understood at the turn of the century will allow you to whisk yourself away on a space-faring adventure for an enlightening, enjoyable few hours. Recommended.

Paul Weiss

Editorial Review:

“Why do people read science fiction? In hopes of receiving such writing as this—a ravishingly accurate vision of things unseen; an utterly unexpected yet necessary beauty.” So says Ursula K. Le Guin in her Introduction to The First Men in the Moon, H. G. Wells’s 1901 tale of space travel. Heavily criticized upon publication for its fantastic ideas, it is now justly considered a science fiction classic.

Cavor, a brilliant scientist who accidentally produces a gravity-defying substance, builds a spaceship and, along with the materialistic Bedford, travels to the moon. The coldly intellectual Cavor seeks knowledge, while Bedford seeks fortune. Instead of insight and gold they encounter the Selenites, a horrifying race of biologically engineered creatures who viciously, and successfully, defend their home.

Four Ways to Forgiveness: Stories

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Just Okay 2 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

Readable, but that's about it -- this book lacks the energy and complexity of previous brilliant LeGuin works. It is mostly a much less rigorous reworking of the extraordinary novel "The Dispossessed", with an inadequte attempt to address the issue of Ekumen superiority vs."native" wisdom -- the question which formed the center of the astonishingly brilliant "Left Hand of Darkness." All the conflicts here drift away, not only unresolved but unfaced in the rigorous way I expect from LeGuin. Never gets to the main issues, either those between the twin planets or regarding their relations with the Ekumen. Derivative and disappointing -- read "Left Hand," or LeGuin's neglected masterpiece "Malafrena" for sustained thought, not vagaries.

Editorial Review:

At the far end of our universe, on the twin planets of Werel and Yeowe, all humankind is divided into "assets" and "owners," tradition and liberation are at war, and freedom takes many forms. Here is a society as complex and troubled as any on our world, peopled with unforgettable characters struggling to become fully human. For the disgraced revolutionary Abberkam, the callow "space brat" Solly, the haughty soldier Teyeo, and the Ekumen historian and Hainish exile Havzhiva, freedom and duty both begin in the heart, and success as well as failure has its costs.

In this stunning collection of four intimately interconnected novellas, Ursula K. Le Guin returns to the great themes that have made her one of America's most honored and respected authors.

The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (Norton Book Of...)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Dreadful. Just really awful. 1 out of 5 stars.
16 of 21 people found this review helpful.

The problem with this book is that it's a "Norton Book" and will be used as a teaching tool. Due to the prominence of Norton's stuff on college campuses, it's easy to imagine students who don't have much experience with written science fiction taking classes from professors who don't have much experience with written science fiction, using this book as a resource. They're going end up being very confused about the subject of science fiction.

There's an element of political correctness to the story selection, an element of pure feminism, and as element of weirdness and mystery. What can she possibly have been thinking? How can anyone be said to know anything about science fiction without going back a little further, to the so-called "golden age" of science fiction which a lot of these stories are reactions against? How can a study of science fiction not include Asimov, Heinlein, or Clarke? The most likely audience of this book is not well served by the story selection.

If none of the above bothers you, you'll find a mixed collection of stories, of which you're bound to enjoy a few. Do not pass judgement on any of the authors whose work seems crappy after a first reading from this book: some of the selections are not fair representations of the author's work in any way. All, or almost all, of the authors represented in the book have written very good stories, but the stories in this volume were chosen because of a mission of the author's which is articulated in the introduction. A simple, perhaps chronological collection of really good stories isn't on the menu, unfortunately.

Editorial Review:

This work provides a look at the best of contemporary science fiction. The 67 stories in the collection offer evidence that science fiction is a source of the most thoughtful, imaginative and literary fiction being written today.

Legends-Vol. 3 Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy (Legends (Tor))

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Be careful, the revs & book info for all 3 vols are mixed up 3 out of 5 stars.
18 of 19 people found this review helpful.

I purchased this book looking for the stories by King and McCaffrey, only to find out that they are in a different volume. The reviews and book info are the same for all three volumes, so I suppose this review will also be listed on all three. Anyway, this is a review for LEGENDS 3!

There are four stories in Legends 3:

New Spring, by Robert Jordan, a Wheel of Time story.

Dragonfly, by Ursula K. Le Guin, an Earthsea story.

The Burning Man, by Tad Williams, a Memory, Sorrow and Thorn story.

The Sea and Little Fishes, by Terry Pratchett, a Discworld story.

This is a case where they saved the best for last :) Each story gets progressively better. I thought I would go ahead and read this book rather than return it since I am always on the lookout for new (to me) fantasy writers. After all the hype about Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, I must say I was sorely dissappointed. The story was fairly interesting, and maybe the books are better than this short story, but I can't say I'm in much of a hurry to buy them now. However, I think maybe my daughter might like the children's versions.

Dragonfly was better, and the ending was the best part of all. If this was the beginning of the series, I'd be much more likely to want to buy the books, but from what I can figure out, this happens at the end of the series. Will we ever find out what happens next? I kinda doubt it. There hasn't been a new book in this series for a long time. But, I might eventually check this series out.

The Burning Man was pretty cool. It seemed to kinda stand alone though. Can't really imagine what the series is like.

The Sea and Little Fishes was the coolest. The whole Discworld thing, the world being flat and flying thru space on the backs of four elephants riding on a giant turtle was a little weird, but that hardly had anything at all to do with the story. It was about witches, not so much about magic as how they interacted with one another and with the mortals all around them. I think I'd like to read more of these.

I hope you find this helpful and don't make the same mistake that I did, thinking all of these stories are in one book, because they are actually in three. If you did find it helpful, please vote that you did. Thanks!

Editorial Review:

The great anthology of short novels by the masters of modern fantasy.

Robert Jordan relates crucial events in the years leading up to The Wheel of Time in "New Spring."

Ursula K. Le Guin adds a sequel to her famous books of Earthsea, portraying a woman who wants to learn magic, in "Dragonfly."

Tad Williams tells a dark and enthralling story of a haunted castle in the age before Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, in "The Burning Man."

Terry Pratchett relates an amusing incident in Discworld, of a magical contest and the witch Granny Weatherwax, in "The Sea and Little Fishes."

Searoad

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Superb fiction from a master of science fiction 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I read SEAROAD a year ago and was immensely taken with it. Recently, in browsing through the Amazon web-site, I noticed that it had not received any reviews. That is a glaring omission, which these comments are intended to begin addressing.

It should be stated up front that SEAROAD is NOT a work of science fiction or fantasy, the genre for which Le Guin is best known. Instead, it is a collection of a dozen short stories that most definitely qualify as conventional literate fiction. All but one of the stories originally were published in magazines or journals over a four-year period. But the stories make for a very compatible collection inasmuch as they share the same setting -- a small oceanside community on the rugged Oregon coast named Klatsand -- and several share characters as well. With regard to both the physical setting and the characters, Le Guin demonstrates that, in addition to science fiction and fantasy, she is quite skilled at writing literate, sensitive, and captivating fiction of a realistic nature. In particular, she has an uncanny ability to get inside and inhabit the minds and souls of her characters.

If you appreciate excellent literate short stories, please don't pass over SEAROAD simply because it is by Ursula Le Guin and you are not a fan of science fiction; you will have deprived yourself of something special. On the other hand, if you are a fan of Le Guin's works of fantasy, you still might give SEAROAD a try; it's very good stuff.

Editorial Review:

In one of her most deeply felt works of fiction, Le Guin explores the dreams and sorrows of the inhabitants of Klatsand, Oregon, a beach town where ordinary people bring their dreams and sorrows for a weekend or the rest of their lives, and sometimes learn to read what the sea writes on the sand. Searoad is the story of a particular place that could be any place, and of a people so distinctly drawn they could be any of us.

Earthsea Quartet, the (Roc) (Spanish Edition)

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Great 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 16 people found this review helpful.

This is the first in a series of books. There are 4 novels in the series and two collections of short stories. It follows the life and career of Ged a young man from the Island of Gont. Le Guin has created a very unique world, a world that is mostly water and each nation is a collection of islands. This book is also one of a few that has children's teens and adult editions in print.

Ged apprentices to the local Wizard on God, and is eventually sent to the school for wizards on Havnor. There in anger during a fight with other youths he releases a dark shadow, an evil. The Masters of the school appear and banish it from the island. However this shadow and Ged are now tied together in a very unique way.

After leaving the school Ged becomes haunted by the shadow he has released. He tries to return to the protection of Havnor but cannot return to the island the magic protecting the island will not let him approach. So he decides to head south.

The shadow is getting closer and closer to him, and he must discern it's true name or else he will not be able to defeat it. Can he solve the puzzle, will he wrestle with his shadow and win or will he succumb to the evil he has let loose.

This is a book I first read back in highschool. Then a few years back had to read it for an English literature course at the University of Waterloo I was about a third of the way through it when I realized I had read it before and that is when I found our that the story continued. Since then the two collections of short stories have been published in this world.

Le Guin deals with some big questions of life in this book. Such questions as:

Who am I?
Do I have a role or purpose in life?
Can I defeat the darkness within me?
Can good conquer over evil?
Why am I here?
Can I make a difference?

This book will be a good read for anyone who has ever struggled with some of these questions. Or who wants to use a novel to help them grow to have a deeper understanding of themselves.

Editorial Review:

A superb four-part fantasy, comparable with the work of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the Earthsea books follow the fortunes of the wizard Ged from his childhood to an age where magic is giving way to evil. As a young dragonlord, Ged, whose use-name is Sparrowhawk, is sent to the island of Roke to learn the true way of magic. A natural magician, Ged becomes an Archmage and helps the High Priestess Tenar escape from the labyrinth of darkness. But as the years pass, true magic and ancient ways are forced to submit to the powers of evil and death...