(no subject)
Mar. 27th, 2011 09:23 pmI have this problem with books: I'm really bad at reading things for fun.
That's not to say that I deliberately pick something torturous, but I nearly always pick something that requires careful attention. I have perverse puritan work ethic; I can procrastinate for hours doing something of no value whatsoever, like building elaborate temple complexes in the Sims, but when it comes to reading--if I'm reading, it had better learn me something!
So, about a week ago, I picked up a book that has been sitting on my to-read shelf for about ten years that I'd been put off reading because although I love the author, when I'm reading fiction I usually just don't want to read anything too political.
It was The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin.
It's a really good book, although it can sometimes come across as a little didactic, and I had a hard time believing that political theories and systems in an entirely different solar system would be so similar to our own. (The characters are supposed to be related to humans, but I would have had a hard time buying it even if they were fully human.)
One thing that LeGuin is so good at is drilling down and exposing the shaky bedrock on which her societies are founded, and then not proposing any solutions for fixing it. In the end, I think we find that the protagonist's anarchist society is preferable to the capitalist, highly stratified society that he visits, but it's never portrayed as perfect. He leaves it only to find there's no place else to go.
Yeah, I suck at reading things for fun. That was depressing.
That's not to say that I deliberately pick something torturous, but I nearly always pick something that requires careful attention. I have perverse puritan work ethic; I can procrastinate for hours doing something of no value whatsoever, like building elaborate temple complexes in the Sims, but when it comes to reading--if I'm reading, it had better learn me something!
So, about a week ago, I picked up a book that has been sitting on my to-read shelf for about ten years that I'd been put off reading because although I love the author, when I'm reading fiction I usually just don't want to read anything too political.
It was The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin.
It's a really good book, although it can sometimes come across as a little didactic, and I had a hard time believing that political theories and systems in an entirely different solar system would be so similar to our own. (The characters are supposed to be related to humans, but I would have had a hard time buying it even if they were fully human.)
One thing that LeGuin is so good at is drilling down and exposing the shaky bedrock on which her societies are founded, and then not proposing any solutions for fixing it. In the end, I think we find that the protagonist's anarchist society is preferable to the capitalist, highly stratified society that he visits, but it's never portrayed as perfect. He leaves it only to find there's no place else to go.
Yeah, I suck at reading things for fun. That was depressing.
