Comment by jboynyc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jboynyc | Hacker News Reader

I recently read The Dispossessed and The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin, and will continue reading her stuff over the summer for sure. It's really great. (HN discussion about her obituary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16218439)

The other day I started Pictures of a Gone City, a book about the Bay Area by critical geographer Richard Walker. It was recently discussed here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17473141). I'm only about fifty pages in, but I can tell this is going to be worthwhile.

I'm also still finishing Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris. It's a very compelling account of the crises and pressures confronting today's young adults (among which I can still, just barely, count myself).

Other books I've got lined up for the summer:

• The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network, by Kate Losse. This memoir by an early Facebook employee came out a few years ago, and I finally want to read it.

• Social Creature, by Tara Isabella Burton. Recently published novel that's been getting rave reviews. It's been described as "a literary novel about social media."

• Surveys, by Natasha Stagg. A novel about microcelebrity/instafame that came out in 2016.

PS: LitHub runs a "Rotten Tomatoes for Book Reviews" site at https://bookmarks.reviews/ that I'm finding to be a useful resource to discover new books coming out. That's how I found out about the Burton and Stagg books.

I read The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed at the beginning of the year, just before she passed away. This summer I the first four books of the Earthsea series and will probably read The Other Wind and Tales soon. I've really enjoyed both universes--with Earthsea I keep wishing someone would make a game with this kind of magic system. The Lathe of Heaven is such a wonderful title, I'm looking forward to reading that as well.

I read her translation of Tao Te Ching while waiting in 2 hours of traffic for a ferry and it was wonderful and really informs the rest of her works.

I'm currently reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, on the history of U.S. water policy in the West. Frustratingly dry.

Also re-reading On the Road but unlike 16 years ago I'm reading the 'Original Scroll Edition' this time: no chapters, paragraph breaks, invented character names, censors, etc. The book you read in high school is, in fact, the novelization of the original, which Kerouac wrote in twenty days. I've kept my beat-up paperback copy of the 'novel' nearby and I've preferred the scroll edition for the most part.

On the nightstand: - Annals of the Former World by John McPhee 300 pages into it, but I got a bit tired of the redundancy inherent in combining multiple books into one. - The Vulgar Tongue by Jonathon Green. 40 pages in. I've been looking for a copy of the dictionary. - The Path to the Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino.

> Ursula K. Le Guin

I tried reading her Earthsea series once, but I found her writing style rather awkward. It all felt rather emotionless and descriptive, with much detail left out. In fact, now I think about it, it rather reminded me of the writing style of the Old Testament. Are her other books also like that?

Her Hainish novels (SF) may be more to your liking, but I think all of her works are informed by the kind of mysticism that informed her translation of the Tao Te Ching. What made A Wizard of Earthsea dry for you?

Much of it was written in the way of "The wizard went here and this this, and it was pretty damn cool". It wasn't necessarily dry, but it was so differently written from the fantasy I normally read I couldn't get used to it on my first time reading it. It should probably try again at some point, however. The setting was really cool.

It definitely is distinct. Personally I find it refreshing after all the 500-1200pg fantasy I read. There's something poetic about compressing so much into so little words. I find that it flows nicely. It's more poetic than dramatic.

Hey, thanks! I have never heard of that website. Will be truly useful.

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