Quote:
Originally Posted by Dazrin
I am getting more comfortable with abandoning books I have selected than I used to be, but I still don't like to do it.
It is a totally different thing to not finish a book someone else or a group has selected for me to read. I give book club selections an honest shot (even when I'm dreading them), meaning "more of a chance than I would give a book I selected", but I don't feel (too) bad when I have done that and still end up abandoning one.
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I feel much the same way. Sometimes I do refrain from voting if I feel there is a book that I am certain I won’t read on the list but usually I will give the selection a trial. But as Issybird said, “Time is precious” and I submerge my completist tendency if I am simply not going to enjoy the book.
As to LeGuin, she is recognised as a truly great feminist science fiction writer and
The Left Hand of Darkness is a trailblazer in the field. I hadn’t realised that she died only last January. Here is a brief biographical snippet from
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia.
(1929-2018) US author, based in Portland, Oregon, whose first novel was published in 1966; by 1970 she was already recognized as one of the most important writers within the field. Decades before her death, her reputation had extended far beyond the readership of Genre SF, while within the genre she was honoured with five Hugos and six Nebulas; as much attention has been paid to her by the academic community as to Philip K Dick.
Le Guin was the daughter of Dr Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876-1960) and Theodora Kroeber (1897-1979), the former a noted anthropologist who published much work on Native Americans, the latter a writer and anthropologist best known for
Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (1961). Le Guin was thus brought up in academic surroundings; her own education, including a master's degree from Columbia, was in Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, particularly French. She wrote Poetry – collected in several volumes beginning with
Wild Angels (coll 1975 chap) – and several unpublished nonfantastic novels, seemingly all set in the imaginary Central European country of Orsinia.