Was I excited about the Golden Man Booker Prize? No, of course not. I was barely aware of it. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is the winner of the prize, which was established to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the Booker. It was (sort of) determined by popular vote at the Man Booker Prize […]
I do not read beach books in the summer, unless they are literally beach books: I recommend the Odyssey, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic, and Gail Godwin’s Grief Cottage. For summer reading projects I prefer classics, the kind for which you need an introduction and footnotes. One summer my husband and […]
Last year the Library of America published two volumes of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish stories and novels. I was not familiar with her early work: I began reading her in the 1990s. My favorite of her books is The Birthday of the World and Other Stories. I also admire her famous novel, The Left […]
“We will need writers who can remember freedom.” —Ursula K. Le Guin’s 2014 speech at the National Book Awards I wrote here a few years ago that Ursula K. Le Guin should have won the Nobel Prize. In her honor, I am reprinting my post about The Unreal and The Real: Selected Stories of Ursula […]
Last-minute gifts are a bad, bad idea. This is your life. This is your wife’s life, too. That is why I, your personal shopper, am interceding. Your stressed-out wife may or may not want a diamond necklace from Gales–I don’t know her, but I wouldn’t –but she will not be amused if you present her […]
The new Penguin Galaxy series is a collection of six hardcover science fiction classics: T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, & William Gibson’s Neuromancer. These beautifully-designed books […]
Genre fiction is popular, but it is still not quite the thing among the literati. In order of acceptability, we have (a) mysteries, (b) historical fiction, (c) SF, and (d) romance. SF is the most daring of the genres, but has long been considered a bastard child of literature, perhaps because it depends on “world-building” […]
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. –Dorothy Parker For Christmas I requested Michael Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, a literary science fiction novel praised by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Typical of me, right? I am […]
Are you ready? A quick blog. 7:45 p.m. I love genre fiction. It all started when my friend, Maya, a former librarian who went back to school in classics, recommended Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. As a librarian, she had had a lot of free time, and science fiction was her […]
“Reading books by men exhausts me,” I told my husband crossly. I am in the middle of Dave Eggers’ Hologram for the King, a beautifully-crafted novel about a failed Schwinn bicycle salesman/executive turned IT salesman in Saudi Arabia; he spends his days waiting for a meeting with the king in a city barely under construction. […]
mirabile dictu 