Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Fine, but not for me

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

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This was a library sci-fi book club pick, and I’m not sure it’s one I would’ve finished otherwise. I know Le Guin is the Grandma of Science Fiction, and I’ve read and enjoyed her before, but this one felt like a Philosophy 101 class and I don’t think I was quite in the mood for it. Urras is the main planet, crowded with haves and have nots and doing the normal things society does, except for an added focus on science and physics. Anarres is […]

The cover makes the book look more exciting than it is

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I know that Ursula K. Le Guin is a big name in influential fantasy authors, especially for children’s and YA.  And I’d never read anything by her, so I figured that I should.  A Wizard of Earthsea is the classic hero’s journey with wizards and magic and dragons and all sorts of other stuff.  What more could you ask for?   Apparently a lot.  I was bored!  Partly due to the story, and partly because of the language. It felt stuffy.  I think she was […]

Two pieces of yesterday were in Captain Davidson’s mind when he woke, and he lay looking at them in the darkness for a while.

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K Le Guin

The Telling by Ursula K Le Guin

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The Word for World is Forest: 3/5 Stars A novella from 1972 and part of the Hainish cycle, this book tells the story of a human colony sent to an arboreal world to strip all the resources from it. They are commanded by a human explorer extraordinaire (who is characterized and portrayed in a very 19th century American sensibility of absolute dominance over the landscape and the people who live there). We come across the colony as they are about to receive a “shipment” of […]

Getting my nerd card revoked

Unlocking the Air by Ursula K. Le Guin

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You guuuuuuys, I feel terrible, but I did NOT enjoy this. The writing is, of course, incredible. It’s amazing how quickly Le Guin can set a scene and sketch out a character. Even the stories that were only a few pages long had an incredibly clear snapshot of a person or a setting. She can make a character feel real with only a few paragraphs. However. They’re not real stories, which is what my brain had been expecting. A lot of them are completely aimless […]

Well, hell, I still don’t know what the perfect society looks like

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

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CBR11bingo: Award Winner – Nebula Award for Best Novel (1974), Hugo Award for Best Novel (1975), Locus Award for Best Novel (1975) Double Bingo! Horizontal: I Love This, Not My Wheelhouse, Listicle, Rainbow Flag, Award Winner Vertical: Reading the TBR, Science!, History/Schmistory, Award Winner, Summer Read Last year I read my first Le Guin Novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, and couldn’t stop raving about it. On the advice of a fellow Cannonballer, I decided to read The Dispossessed for my Award Winner Square (tip for next […]

Left wanting more… (and hooray – this completes two bingo lines!)

The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K Le Guin

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CBR11 Bingo- Birthday   I had to find a square for my girl Le Guin on this bingo card, and fortunately her birthday was October 21, so that was an easy pick 🙂 I’ve had The Eye of the Heron  on my TBR list for a while, and this seemed like a perfect time to pick it up. I love Le Guin not only because of her writing itself, but for the fact that she is one of the truly great female fantasy/sci-fi writers. Even when […]



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