No Time to Spare: Thinking about what mattersby Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781328661593
Publication Date: January 1, 2017
Pages: 215
Genre: Essays
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, a collection of thoughts — always adroit, often acerbic — on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation.
Ursula K. Le Guin on the absurdity of denying your age: “If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.”
On cultural perceptions of fantasy: “The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”
On breakfast: “Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime.”
Ursula K. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In the last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined. The collected best of Ursula’s blog, No Time to Spare presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”
Previous to this book I knew of Ursula K. Le Guin, but had never read her work; she’s primarily known for her science fiction writing and I’m known for not liking science fiction. But I’d read something about her somewhere that left me with the impression that she had an interesting voice outside her known genre, and I’d heard great things about this collection of essays, so I bought it a couple of years ago, and it’s sat on my TBR ever since.
Recent events however, have left me ping-ponging back and forth between light reads and chewier reads in an effort not to dwell on all the things that are outside my control at the moment. One of those things outside my control at the moment is my attention span, or the lack thereof, so I thought this a perfect time to pull this one off the shelf (which was within reach, thankfully).
I enjoyed this book, with a few blips along the way, from start to finish. Le Guin was a very talented writer with a timeless voice, and even when I didn’t agree with her, I enjoyed reading what she had to say. Of course, the essays about her cat Pard were my favourites, but those about ageing put things into a perspective I’d never seen better articulated, and I wanted to go back in time and hug her for her essay on belief vs. thought.
I’m still unlikely to ever read her fiction, but there’s at least one more collection of essays I’d love to get my hands on, if only to visit with this wonderful author and her mind one more time.