eternalsummer Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 She was my favorite author, has been since I was about 10 and read the Earthsea trilogy. I am sad today. I sort of always thought someday in the future I'd go up to Oregon to see her speak or sign books, but by the time I had the money and time to travel she had stopped most of that. Anyway, "The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas" and all the short stories in Compass Rose are really good if you're not into sci-fi novels, per se. But her sci-fi was more allegory than sci-fi, imo. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maize Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 (edited) She was one of my favorite authors too. The Word for World is Forest was one of my favorites. Edited January 23, 2018 by maize 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greta Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 Oh, I am so sorry to hear this. I've only read The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. I liked them quite a lot, so I'm not sure why I never got around to reading her other works. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eternalsummer Posted January 23, 2018 Author Share Posted January 23, 2018 (edited) I liked The Word for World is Forest, too. I am not empathetic to that degree, obviously, but I get the sensation of sometimes being too perceptive of other people's perceptions of my perceptions, and being snappish because of it. ETA; ack! I mixed up The Word for World is Forest with "Vaster than Empires and More Slow"; my comment refers to the latter, but maize was referencing the former. That's the one with the indigenous people who lucid dream, right (and the lucid dreaming goes even further than that)? I found that one mysterious on first reading as a teenager and harder to bear as an adult when I reread it. Quite a sad book, but I guess that was the point and it was effective. Greta, The Left Hand of Darkness was one of my favorite of her books when I was younger especially - all of the gender stuff went completely over my head, but the part when Genly Ai is relfecting back on when they were on the Ice and they'd be huddled up in the tent, just them and that cool heater thing against hundreds of miles of glacier, and he remembers it not as happiness but as joy, and sees that joy as the center of his own life - that resonated even at age 20. Edited January 24, 2018 by eternalsummer 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greta Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 I liked The Word for World is Forest, too. I am not empathetic to that degree, obviously, but I get the sensation of sometimes being too perceptive of other people's perceptions of my perceptions, and being snappish because of it. Greta, The Left Hand of Darkness was one of my favorite of her books when I was younger especially - all of the gender stuff went completely over my head, but the part when Genly Ai is relfecting back on when they were on the Ice and they'd be huddled up in the tent, just them and that cool heater thing against hundreds of miles of glacier, and he remembers it not as happiness but as joy, and sees that joy as the center of his own life - that resonated even at age 20. You made me realize I need to re-read it! I think I would get so much more out of it now than I did when I first read it many, many years ago. But I enjoyed it even then. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Twigs Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 :grouphug: :grouphug: :grouphug: 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alisoncooks Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 I read the Earthsea books last year for the first time. I don't know how I'd missed them all these years. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anne Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 She was one of my favorite authors in years past, also. Anne 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spryte Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 Oh no. :( 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dsmith Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 Oh no! I was just about to start a major re-read of her books. I'm so sad! :sad: 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bluegoat Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 Oh dear. Yes, she's one of my favourites too, and I always appreciate her take on fiction and science-fi writing as well. I read the Earthsea books years ago, and they ruined me for Harry Potter. And as an adult her science-fi has really influenced my thinking. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dirty ethel rackham Posted January 23, 2018 Share Posted January 23, 2018 Oh, how sad. I remember reading The Wizard of Earthsea with my boys' book club many years ago. We then read The Left Hand of Darkness a few years later. I always meant to read more of her works. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PrincessMommy Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 I'm very sad about this. Such a great author. May she rest in peace 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
samba Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 (edited) She was my favorite author, has been since I was about 10 and read the Earthsea trilogy. I am sad today. I sort of always thought someday in the future I'd go up to Oregon to see her speak or sign books, but by the time I had the money and time to travel she had stopped most of that. Anyway, "The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas" and all the short stories in Compass Rose are really good if you're not into sci-fi novels, per se. But her sci-fi was more allegory than sci-fi, imo. As an English major in college, I had to take a course in Speculative Fiction. I was not happy. Sci-fi is not my genre. I was unexpectedly intrigued by Left Hand of Darkness but totally captivated by The Wind's Twelve Quarters, which is where I first read The Ones Who Walk Away...I recently got the book again from my library because I remembered how much I had been moved by those stories. Edited January 24, 2018 by samba 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eternalsummer Posted January 24, 2018 Author Share Posted January 24, 2018 Oh dear. Yes, she's one of my favourites too, and I always appreciate her take on fiction and science-fi writing as well. I read the Earthsea books years ago, and they ruined me for Harry Potter. And as an adult her science-fi has really influenced my thinking. I think she would have been secretly pleased that Earthsea ruined you for HP; she was never all that laudatory about Harry Potter. She had an interesting thing on her sort-of-blog a couple of years ago - maybe last year? where she was talking to people about writing - she'd ask them to submit questions, preferably thorny ones, and she'd try to answer them (on the blog). It's hosted on bookcafe if anyone wants to look it up - it's not her site, but sort of a conglomeration of authors. She also wrote, last year, what I thought was some of her best stuff in a way - The Annals of Pard. Sounds like highbrow scifi but it was actually life from the perspective of her cat (Pard). I reread the Earthsea trilogy every few years; it always has something new to offer, it seems. She was also something of a Taoist - I don't know that calling her a Taoist would be correct as I'm certain she didn't participate or believe in the religious rituals of it, per se, but the ideas are present throughout her work and she did translate the Tao Te Ching at one point. Incidentally, a different translation of the Tao was how I found God, or spirituality, or the Universe, or whatever you might call it, again after a period of fairly militant atheism/behaviorism (loved Skinner!) in my early 20s. One day not long after that I was looking through different translations of the Tao in a Barnes & Noble and found hers. All of a sudden, my affinity for her writing made a lot of sense. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heathermomster Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 Never read her. Which book should I start with? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eternalsummer Posted January 24, 2018 Author Share Posted January 24, 2018 My favorite is The Tombs of Atuan and I think it is her finest. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eternalsummer Posted January 24, 2018 Author Share Posted January 24, 2018 As an English major in college, I had to take a course in Speculative Fiction. I was not happy. Sci-fi is not my genre. I was unexpectedly intrigued by Left Hand of Darkness but totally captivated by The Wind's Twelve Quarters, which is where I first read The Ones Who Walk Away...I recently got the book again from my library because I remembered how much I had been moved by those stories. That is a great collection of short stories. I had that and The Compass Rose as a young teenager and read them over and over (and was haunted by some and starry-eyed by others). All of the Hainish short stories are wonderful. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Annie G Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 Youngest dd loved Catwings and at 25 still has a copy on her shelf. She loved all of them and oh my she ate many meals with her nose in a Catwings book. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matryoshka Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 She was my favorite author and I've read most of what she wrote - even some of the more obscure stuff like Malafrena (the one book by her I'd say not to bother with - guess that's why it's obscure). I reread The Dispossessed for the first time last year and it was still as good as I remembered. After that I had already decided I wanted to reread my way back through her work. I also love the Compass Rose stories - I think I have read through those more than once already. For non scifi people, she also wrote a bunch of short stories set in a town in Oregon (Searoad); also very good. :crying: 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eternalsummer Posted January 24, 2018 Author Share Posted January 24, 2018 I thought the Searoad stories were terrible when I was younger, but I reread them last year after finding it in a used bookstore and they are actually great stories. They don't have any appeal to kids at all, though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PrairieSong Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 I knew there would be people in the Hive who shared my sadness at her death. She was a favorite of mine, too, since I was a young teen. I really, really need to re-read The Left Hand of Darkness. I enjoyed this video of Neil Gaiman presenting her a lifetime achievement award. https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=109s&v=5PI1xwT2-74 Sent from my XT1635-01 using Tapatalk 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matryoshka Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 I thought the Searoad stories were terrible when I was younger, but I reread them last year after finding it in a used bookstore and they are actually great stories. They don't have any appeal to kids at all, though. I discovered her as a teen, but other than maybe Earthsea (and maybe even that, in spite of being purportedly YA), I think her work is definitely better appreciated by adults. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eternalsummer Posted January 24, 2018 Author Share Posted January 24, 2018 What's funny is she was of course fairly far to the left - maybe not entirely in modern terms, but for sure an ardent feminist and fairly outspoken re: Trump and etc. Definitely she was not a fan of capitalism. So our politics are worlds apart, really. Reading her blog was sometimes a painful experience because of how solidly we disagreed (or at least because of how thoroughly I thought she'd missed the mark on this or that issue). And yet, her books spoke to me, a very conservative woman, as essential truth. They spoke to me as truth when I was a child, and when I was myself a liberal 20 year old, and as a conservative now. In her books (less so in her non-book, more casual writing), she was largely fair-minded, and when she wasn't, or when I thought she was wrong, it seemed secondary to the story anyway. I think probably she would have (and maybe did at some point, she was quite self-analytical) agreed with this, as she saw the source of writing as a sort of spring in the mind - almost like Emerson's idea of fitting into the cosmic current, although I doubt she saw it in mystical terms, exactly. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bluegoat Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 What's funny is she was of course fairly far to the left - maybe not entirely in modern terms, but for sure an ardent feminist and fairly outspoken re: Trump and etc. Definitely she was not a fan of capitalism. So our politics are worlds apart, really. Reading her blog was sometimes a painful experience because of how solidly we disagreed (or at least because of how thoroughly I thought she'd missed the mark on this or that issue). And yet, her books spoke to me, a very conservative woman, as essential truth. They spoke to me as truth when I was a child, and when I was myself a liberal 20 year old, and as a conservative now. In her books (less so in her non-book, more casual writing), she was largely fair-minded, and when she wasn't, or when I thought she was wrong, it seemed secondary to the story anyway. I think probably she would have (and maybe did at some point, she was quite self-analytical) agreed with this, as she saw the source of writing as a sort of spring in the mind - almost like Emerson's idea of fitting into the cosmic current, although I doubt she saw it in mystical terms, exactly. I think conservative and progressive aren't as analogous to the political left and right as many people think - there is a lot of overlap I find between certain types of leftists and certain types of conservatives, particularly outside the US where conservatism isn't so tied to individualism and free market ideologies. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Granny_Weatherwax Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 I had never heard of her until this morning when NPR ran a broadcast about her death and rebroadcast a Fresh Air interview from years ago. The interview was delightful and informative and I put a couple of her books on my TBR list. -- My first thought was - I wonder if anyone discussed this on TWTM? 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vonfirmath Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 I've tried to start her books before. Earthsea. Left Hand of Darkness. Had a friend who recommended them highly. But I've never been able to get into them. Just got distracted to other things. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldberry Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 Sad here too... She was awesome. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chrysalis Academy Posted January 24, 2018 Share Posted January 24, 2018 For a lovely tribute to her life, I recommend her short story The Day Before the Revolution. It's actually kind of a prequel to The Dispossessed, but even if you haven't read that, it works as a stand-alone story about an old woman reflecting back on her life and her accomplishments and what it all means. It seems appropriate to the moment. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eternalsummer Posted January 24, 2018 Author Share Posted January 24, 2018 For a lovely tribute to her life, I recommend her short story The Day Before the Revolution. It's actually kind of a prequel to The Dispossessed, but even if you haven't read that, it works as a stand-alone story about an old woman reflecting back on her life and her accomplishments and what it all means. It seems appropriate to the moment. Agreed. Here it is online: http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/tbacig/hmcl3230/3230anth/day.html (not sure how it came to be there) 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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