Tamsin

Ursula K. Le Guin was my mother’s favourite author. Mum kept encouraging me to read her books, but I have always found her writing difficult to focus on; although her prose is beautiful, I find it takes quite a lot of effort and thought to read and it’s sometimes a bit much for my ADD brain. When I have managed to persevere with her books, however, I have been amply rewarded: The Dispossessed is one of my all-time favourite novels and I also loved A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else.

What prompted me to write this post, however, was not Le Guin’s books but her blogging. She writes at the Book View Cafe Blog, along with several other cool authors, and also at her website. And she has written a story and posted it on her blog: Ninety-Nine Weeks: A Fairy Tale. It’s a pretty depressing fable about poverty and unemployment, and although I could make a small quibble about the coal versus wood economics in the first couple of paragraphs, it is well worth reading. She ends it with some sobering facts and figures about unemployment in the USA.

After reading this story I started searching through the archives at Le Guin’s website and I found this gem: A letter to The Oregonian from October. On the power of demonstrations, she writes:

They [previous demonstrations] were about nuclear bomb testing that put strontium-90 in our kids’ milk. They were about a misguided war in Viet ...