Dream with Our Eyes Open

People have been quoting some of their favorite bits of Le Guin's works. I'd like to do so as well . This is a poem from Always Coming Home. That book is arranged as a series of memoirs, articles, poems, songs, prayers, stories, recipes, and more from a people who "might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California."

On Second Hill
by Ire of Sinshan.

Whenever I come to this place
always somebody
always somebody
has been walking here
has walked here before me.

The trails in the grass are thin and crooked
hard to follow, leading
to the sacred of this place.
The flicker knocks the oak
five times, four times.

Who came here
before me, before sunrise?
Before the flicker?
Whose paths?

Their feet are narrow and divided,
their legs slender.
They walk
in a sacred manner.

And from A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book by her I ever read, when I was eleven:

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.

I finished All the Birds in the Sky. It wasn't bad, but it just sort of ended: too much build up, not enough resolution. And now I'm annoyed by the title, because although it sounds really nifty, it doesn't have all that much to do with the story. This is not going to be my top vote for best novel, I'm afraid.

Also in Hugo reading, I read through Ursula Le Guin's Words Are My Matter, a collection of recent short non-fiction pieces. I love Le Guin as an essayist, and the first part of the book contains some good examples. But the back half-and-a-bit is introductions to books and book reviews, and I found those less interesting. A number of them were for non-genre literary or magical realism works that didn't sound as though they'd appeal to me. She did mention a couple of Western (as in, Western U.S.) novels that I might want to look up, which I will mention here partially for my own reference: Crazy Weather by Charles McNichols and The Jump-Off Creek and The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss. Also, although Perdido Street Station pretty much put me off China Mielville for life, her review of Embassytown is making me reconsider.

Overall, unless the rest of the Related Works are very mediocre, I don't think this will be my top pick in that category.

I have just started Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, which is short-listed for Best Novel. A number of the readers on File 770 had trouble with this book, but I'm not finding it problematic thus far. Possibly the fact that I actually like Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford (link goes to Kirkus review), which was also purposefully written in the style of an earlier era, has something to do with this. I'll have to see where the book goes, of course.

Finally, I'll be re-reading some of Fruits Basket, Because Reasons. Does anyone recall the number of the exact volume in which Machi shows up? It's when she wrecks the student council room, if the Wikia is to be believed.