4.0
Words Are My Matter
ByPublisher Description
A collection of essays on life and literature, from one of the most iconic authors and astute critics in contemporary letters.
Words Are My Matter is essential reading: a collection of talks, essays, and criticism by Ursula K. Le Guin, a literary legend and unparalleled voice of our social conscience. Here she investigates the depth and breadth of contemporary fiction—and, through the lens of literature, gives us a way of exploring the world around us.
In “Freedom,” Le Guin notes: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now … to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”
Le Guin was one of those authors and in Words Are My Matter she gives us just that: a vision of a better reality, fueled by the power and might and hope of language and literature.
Words Are My Matter is essential reading: a collection of talks, essays, and criticism by Ursula K. Le Guin, a literary legend and unparalleled voice of our social conscience. Here she investigates the depth and breadth of contemporary fiction—and, through the lens of literature, gives us a way of exploring the world around us.
In “Freedom,” Le Guin notes: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now … to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”
Le Guin was one of those authors and in Words Are My Matter she gives us just that: a vision of a better reality, fueled by the power and might and hope of language and literature.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesWords Are My Matter Reviews
4.0
Imane
Created 12 days agoShare
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“dnf @55%
The short of it is: this book was ass. Since I made it through the halfway point, I am allowing myself to give it a rating, which reflects the bits I did enjoy about this book
The longer explanation is: I'm quite surprised this was published and went on to win a Hugo award. Even as an honorary award, it's hard to defend. This book is compiled from various writings that Le Guin published between the early 2000s and mid-2010s, and while some of them were interesting and even galvanising, they were consistently bogged down by a strange allegiance to Orientalism and liberal Islamophobia that she couldn't quite shake off. Every time she made a point about extremely important topics such as abortion or capitalism itself, she had to ruin it by adding something along the lines of "What are we? A bunch of MUSLIMS?!!". Though I suppose it shouldn't be so strange given her positionality.
This was about her personal essays part. The part of the book that concerns book reviews she wrote in the same timeframe, which compose 60% of the book, is aggravating for multiple reasons. First of all, making a book out of book reviews is quite strange to me. While I love the craft of book reviewing and frequently read them, including books I have no intention to read whatsoever, there are only so many I can find interesting, and even fewer that I'd say deserve to be printed and sold as books. Whoever put them together must've been dedicated to pissing me off on a cosmic scale. Then come the actual book reviews themselves, which were frankly boring to read, but also not particularly to my taste when it came to the description of certain tropes, dynamics, and characters. In particular, calling Huckleberry Finn's Jim a hard R n-word not just once but twice in a row for no reason (literary or historical) made me realise that no earthly or divine force in this universe was holding me at gunpoint to finish this book. I simply do not care to know what Le Guin thought about books she read in her lifetime, and in particular, books I have either no intention of reading or books I haven't read yet and don't want to be spoiled for. So, I returned Words Are My Matter to the library, and my only regret is that I ever started reading it.
I will continue to read her fiction and her non-fiction because I have a history of enjoying them, but this one was a disappointment of criminal proportions.”
Katy
Created about 1 month agoShare
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Luke Estrada
Created about 2 months agoShare
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“This book deserves more stars but the section dedicated to book reviews was lost on me. I haven’t read any of the books! I promise to the ghost of Le Guin that as I read them I’ll return to her essays and I’m sure we’ll have plenty to happily disagree about.”
Kaiempty
Created 2 months agoShare
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About Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters. Her body of work includes twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award, along with a PEN/Malamud Award and many other accolades. In 2016 she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.
Other books by Ursula K. Le Guin
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