More from one of the greats of SFF
Mar. 16th, 2023 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileSometimes when I’m looking for something to read I “shop my stash” and find something I had totally forgotten I had. This is how I picked up Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, which I hadn’t noticed on my Le Guin kick earlier this winter because it was blocked by some decorative stuff hanging out on my shelf.
It’s not a very long book but it has a lot of essays in it because they are mostly very short. The somewhat longer ones are the ones on rhythm, which feature lots of snippets and analyses of various great works of English prose, and a couple not-great ones for contrast. (A textbook, even a well-written one, is never a great work of English prose.) The shortest ones are poems and performance art pieces, and some of the talks. There are also a couple of hand-drawn illustrations, which are very funny in a way that illustrates (ha) why Le Guin is known as a master prose stylist but not so much as a master visual artist.
I know I had more things to say about this book when I finished reading it two days ago but they are dwindling away. Le Guin is very smart and I am right now getting over some kind of illness and have a pounding headache, which means I, never as smart as Le Guin to start with, am currently very dumb. So all I can say right now is that if you are interested in a very good writer’s thoughts about what makes good writing, you can’t go wrong with reading Le Guin.
It’s not a very long book but it has a lot of essays in it because they are mostly very short. The somewhat longer ones are the ones on rhythm, which feature lots of snippets and analyses of various great works of English prose, and a couple not-great ones for contrast. (A textbook, even a well-written one, is never a great work of English prose.) The shortest ones are poems and performance art pieces, and some of the talks. There are also a couple of hand-drawn illustrations, which are very funny in a way that illustrates (ha) why Le Guin is known as a master prose stylist but not so much as a master visual artist.
I know I had more things to say about this book when I finished reading it two days ago but they are dwindling away. Le Guin is very smart and I am right now getting over some kind of illness and have a pounding headache, which means I, never as smart as Le Guin to start with, am currently very dumb. So all I can say right now is that if you are interested in a very good writer’s thoughts about what makes good writing, you can’t go wrong with reading Le Guin.