Le Guin has a well-ordered mind, but No Time to Spare is a more casual rummage sale of a book.

Such considered ruminations don’t always sit comfortably with the book’s fluffier fare about soft-boiled eggs or her cat’s efforts to claw into her hard drive. A stray sentence in a Zadie Smith essay about how Smith has “someone” open her mail sparks a spirited essay about classism and how assistants are diminished when they’re unnamed. Our habit of calling economic productivity “growth” comes at the expense of environmental destruction. The Great American Novel is a suspect concept because “greatness in the abstract, in general, is still thought of as the province of men.” Books and movies overloaded with a particular profanity trouble her not because she’s any kind of prude - her post on the subject uses the word itself more than two dozen times - but because of its “overtones of dominance, of abuse, of contempt, of hatred.”Īt her fiercest, she’s fully persuasive at how consequential and dangerous such word choices are. We misspeak when say we “believe” in the theory of evolution, she argues it’s more correct to say we “accept” it. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”Īnd if her blog has a recurring theme, it’s her eagerness to question the words we often take for granted or dismiss. That echoes her approach in fiction: Her Earthsea series is in part a religious critique in fantasy-novel dress, and she’s smuggled hard questions about capitalism into interplanetary adventure novels like The Dispossessed. Which is why she has a tart retort for those who describe her work as escapist: “The direction of escape is toward freedom. Le Guin comes at these assertions gently at first - her posts often kick off with an anecdote in the paper or a letter she received, before getting at more substantive matters. She’s similarly frustrated with platitudes about our “inner child,” as if children alone possess unfettered imaginations, and that “being a kid is great - so growing up is the pits.” She’s impatient with cliches about being forever young, as if the elderly possess strength they’ve plainly lost: “If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub,” she writes.

Le Guin began blogging about her life, her work and (quite often) her cat.Ī blogging octogenarian is the kind of thing we’re trained to see as endearing and cute, the stuff of bromides like “you’re only as old as you think you are.” But that’s the kind of sentiment Le Guin is eager to swat away in her witty, often deeply observed collection of posts, No Time to Spare (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 215 pp., ★★★ out of four). In 2010, around her 81st birthday, science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K.

Le guin no time to spare