No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

By Ursula K. Le Guin

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.”

“The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them.” — Melissa Febos, New York Times Book Review

“Witty . . . deeply observed.” — USA Today

“A book that truly does matter.” — Houston Chronicle

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Dec 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781328661036

Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was the celebrated author of twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. Her acclaimed books received the Hugo, Nebula, Endeavor, Locus, Otherwise, Theodore Sturgeon, PEN/Malamud, and National Book Awards; a Newbery Honor; and the Pushcart and Janet Heidinger Kafka Prizes, among others. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America. Le Guin was also the recipient of the Association for Library Service to Children’s May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award and the Margaret A. Edwards Award. She received lifetime achievement awards from the World Fantasy Convention, Los Angeles Times, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and Willamette Writers, as well as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award and the Library of Congress Living Legend Award. Her website is UrsulaKLeGuin.com.

Book preview

title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

A Note at the Beginning

Going over Eighty

In Your Spare Time

The Sissy Strikes Back

The Diminished Thing

Catching Up, Ha Ha

The Annals of Pard

Choosing a Cat

Chosen by a Cat

The Lit Biz

Would You Please Fucking Stop?

Readers’ Questions

Kids’ Letters

Having My Cake

Papa H

A Much-Needed Literary Award

TGAN and TGOW

TGAN Again

The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum

It Doesn’t Have to Be the Way It Is

Utopiyin, Utopiyang

The Annals of Pard

The Trouble

Pard and the Time Machine

Trying to Make Sense of It

A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters

Exorcists

Uniforms

Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor

Lying It All Away

The Inner Child and the Nude Politician

A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy

Belief in Belief

About Anger

The Annals of Pard

An Unfinished Education

An Unfinished Education, Continued

Doggerel for My Cat

Rewards

The Circling Stars, the Sea Surrounding: Philip Glass and John Luther Adams

Rehearsal

Someone Named Delores

Without Egg

Nôtre-Dame de la Faim

The Tree

The Horsies Upstairs

First Contact

The Lynx

Notes from a Week at a Ranch in the Oregon High Desert

Read More from Ursula K. Le Guin

About the Author

Connect with HMH

Footnotes

First Mariner Books edition 2019

Copyright © 2017 by Ursula K. Le Guin

Introduction copyright © 2017 by Karen Joy Fowler

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-328-66159-3

ISBN 978-1-328-50797-6 (pbk.)

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover photograph © David & Myrtille / Arcangel

Author photograph © Marion Wood Kolisch

eISBN 978-1-328-66103-6

v6.0320

The illustration on page 154 is by the author.

To Vonda N. McIntyre, with love

Introduction

MANY YEARS AGO I recall seeing a cartoon in The New Yorker. Two men, one a seeker, the other a sage, sit on a ledge in front of a mountain cave, surrounded by cats. The meaning of life is cats, the sage is telling the seeker. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I can pinpoint the year of publication as 1996 and the cartoonist as Sam Gross.

The cartoon came back into my mind while reading this collection. I thought that if I climbed the mountain up to the cave of the wise Ursula Le Guin and posed the predictable question, I might get this very same answer. Or not. Le Guin is not predictable. She might say instead that old age is for anyone who gets there. Or that fear is seldom wise and never kind. Or she might tell me that the grave is without egg.

For the seeker, the answer is less important than what the seeker does with the answer. I don’t know what the important part is for the sage. Le Guin suggests that it just might be breakfast.

Today the trip to the Le Guin cave is less arduous but no less dangerous than the archetypal climb to the mountaintop. You must cross the Wikipedian swamp, with its uncertain footing. Tiptoe by any and all comments sections so as not to wake the trolls. Remember, if you can see them, they can see you! Avoid the monster YouTube, that great eater of hours. Make your way instead to the wormhole known as Google and slide on through. Land at Ursula Le Guin’s website and go directly to the blog to see her most recent postings.

But first read this book.

Here you will find an archive of meditations on many things: aging; exorcism; the need for ritual, especially when performed without specific belief; how a mistake on the Internet can never be corrected; live music and literate children; Homer, Sartre, and Santa Claus. Le Guin is not the sort of sage who demands agreement and obeisance. Anyone who has ever read her books knows this. The musings that follow merely show you what she herself has been thinking about.

But all function beautifully as launchings into your own thoughts. Sometimes the shingle on the cave says that the sage is out. On these occasions, the topic of the day is proposed by Cat instead. Think about beetles, Cat suggests, and so I do. Thinking about beetles proves surprisingly expansive, especially when told to do so by the good cat with the bad paws. I think about cats and their adorable murderous ways. I think about the troubled human/other interface. Somewhere inside us, I think, we all carry the Mowgli dream—that the other animals will see and accept us as one among them. And then we fail this dream when the wrong animals ask it of us. We think we wish to join the wild animals in the jungle but will not tolerate the wild animals in our kitchens. There are too many ants, we think, reaching for the spray, when it is equally true that there are too many humans.

In another essay, in another book, Le Guin has said that so-called realism centers the human. Only the literature of the fantastic deals with the nonhuman as of equal interest and importance. In this and so many other ways, fantasy is the more subversive, the more comprehensive, the more intriguing literature. These two issues combined—our inability to deal with our own numbers and our insistence that we are what matters most—may well be the finish of us. And with these thoughts, I arrive at the end of the world, where I tire finally of thinking about beetles and go back to thinking about Le Guin.

For all the decades of her career, Le Guin has been defending the imagination and all the stories that rise from it. I myself have been finding my way up the mountain my entire adult life, to get her answers to questions I didn’t even know I was asking. Since I am now headed toward seventy, this is a long time. I count among the world’s great gifts to me the fact that I know her personally, that I’ve spent many hours in her company. But if I only (only! ha!) had the books, the gift would still be such a great one.

I think that she’s currently having a moment, a moment of recognition and appreciation. This particular moment (she’s had others) is partly about her deep, foundational impact on a generation of writers like me. At the beginning of this collection, she speaks of discovering José Saramago’s blog and thinking, Oh, I see! Can I do it too? Which is precisely how her own work has functioned for so many of us—as an example, a freeing from convention and expectation, an invitation into a larger world than the one we see.

But to my mind, all of Le Guin’s moments, all the recognition and admiration, fall short of her actual accomplishments. I can think of no other writer in the entirety of history who has created the number of worlds that she has, never mind their complexity and intricacy. Where other writers secure their legacy with a single book, she’s written a dozen worthy of that. And her very last novel, Lavinia, is surely among her great works. She has been both prolific and potent. She has been both playful and powerful. She has, in her life and her work, always been a force for good, an acute social critic, necessary more now than ever as we watch the evil turn the world is taking. We who followed her both as readers and writers are the lucky ones. We not only love her; we need her.

What you will find in these pages here is a more casual Le Guin, a Le Guin at home. Some of the issues that have obsessed her throughout her career—the fatal model of growth capitalism; sisterhood and the ways in which it differs from the male fraternal; the denigration and misunderstandings of genre, science, and belief—continue to appear, but they’ve been sanded back to their absolute essentials. It is particularly pleasurable here to watch the lively way her mind works, and how a posting whose trappings initially seem merely sportive becomes deeply consequential.

Le Guin has always been marvelous on the natural world. She is one of the most noticing people I’ve ever met, always paying attention to the birdsong in the background, the leaf on the tree. Her essay here on the rattlesnake and then the one about the lynx work on me like poetry, sparking expanding emotions I can’t quite identify or have no words for.

I should make up the words! Le Guin would. (Google Fibble, Game of.) So I should say that when I read Le Guin writing about birds or beasts, about particular animals with histories and personalities and singular behaviors, or when I read Le Guin on trees and rivers and all the vanishing beauties of the world, I feel transpaced. I feel other-awed. I feel tongue-gaped.

Tongue-gapedly,

KAREN JOY FOWLER

A Note at the Beginning

October 2010

I’VE BEEN INSPIRED by José Saramago’s extraordinary blogs, which he posted when he was eighty-five and eighty-six years old. They were published this year in English as The Notebooks. I read them with amazement and delight.

I never wanted to blog before. I’ve never liked the word blog—I suppose it is meant to stand for bio-log or something like that, but it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage (Oh, she talks that way because she has such terrible blogs in her nose). I was also put off by the idea that a blog ought to be interactive, that the blogger is expected to read people’s comments in order to reply to them and carry on a limitless conversation with strangers. I am much too introverted to want to do that at all. I am happy with strangers only if I can write a story or a poem and hide from them behind it, letting it speak for me.

So though I have contributed a few bloglike objects to Book View Café, I never enjoyed them. After all, despite the new name, they were just opinion pieces or essays, and writing essays has always been tough work for me and only occasionally rewarding.

But seeing what Saramago did with the form was a revelation.

Oh! I get it! I see! Can I try too?

My trials/attempts/efforts (that’s what essays means) so far have very much less political and moral weight than Saramago’s and are more trivially personal. Maybe that will change as I practice the form, maybe not. Maybe I’ll soon find it isn’t for me after all, and stop. That’s to be seen. What I like at the moment is the sense of freedom. Saramago didn’t interact directly with his readers (except once). That freedom, also, I’m borrowing from him.

Part One

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Going over Eighty

In Your Spare Time

October 2010

I GOT A questionnaire from Harvard for the sixtieth reunion of the Harvard graduating class of 1951. Of course my college was Radcliffe, which at that time was affiliated with but wasn’t considered to be Harvard, due to a difference in gender; but Harvard often overlooks such details from the lofty eminence where it can consider all sorts of things beneath its notice. Anyhow, the questionnaire is anonymous, therefore presumably gender-free; and it is interesting.

The people who are expected to fill it out are, or would be, almost all in their eighties, and sixty years is time enough for all kinds of things to have happened to a bright-eyed young graduate. So there’s a polite invitation to widows or widowers to answer for the deceased. And Question 1c, If divorced, gives an interesting set of little boxes to check: Once, Twice, Three times, Four or more times, Currently remarried, Currently living with a partner, None of the above. This last option is a poser. I’m trying to think how you could be divorced and still none of the above. In any case, it seems unlikely that any of those boxes would have been on a reunion questionnaire in 1951. You’ve come a long way, baby! as the cigarette ad with the bimbo on it used to say.

Question 12: In general, given your expectations, how have your grandchildren done in life? The youngest of my grandchildren just turned four. How has he done in life? Well, very well, on the whole. I wonder what kind of expectations you should have for a four-year-old. That he’ll go on being a nice little boy and learn pretty soon to read and write is all that comes to my mind. I suppose I’m supposed to expect him to go to Harvard, or at least to Columbia like his father and great-grandfather. But being nice and learning to read and write seem quite enough for now.

Actually, I don’t exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears. Mostly the fears predominate these days. When my kids were young I could still hope we might not totally screw up the environment for them, but now that we’ve done so, and are more deeply sold out than ever to profiteering industrialism with its future-horizon of a few months, any hope I have that coming generations may have ease and peace in life has become very tenuous, and has to reach far, far forward into the dark.

Question 13: What will improve the quality of life for the future generations of your family?—with boxes to rank importance from 1 to 10. The first choice is Improved educational opportunities—fair enough, Harvard being in the education business. I gave it a 10. The second is Economic stability and growth for the U.S. That stymied me totally. What a marvelous example of capitalist thinking, or nonthinking: to consider growth and stability as the same thing! I finally wrote in the margin, You can’t have both, and didn’t check a box.

The rest of the choices are: Reduction of the U.S. debt, Reduced dependence on foreign energy, Improved health-care quality and cost, Elimination of terrorism, Implementation of an effective immigration policy, Improved bipartisanship in U.S. politics, Export democracy.

Since we’re supposed to be considering the life of future generations, it seems a strange list, limited to quite immediate concerns and filtered through such current right-wing obsessions as terrorism, effective immigration policy, and the exportation of democracy (which I assume is a euphemism for our policy of invading countries we don’t like and trying to destroy their society, culture, and religion). Nine choices, but nothing about climate destabilization, nothing about international politics, nothing about population growth, nothing about industrial pollution, nothing about the control of government by corporations, nothing about human rights or injustice or poverty . . .

Question 14: Are you living your secret desires? Floored again. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in I have none, my desires are flagrant.

But it was Question 18 that really got me down. In your spare time, what do you do? (check all that apply). And the list begins: Golf . . .

Seventh in the list of twenty-seven occupations, after Racquet sports but before Shopping, TV, and Bridge, comes Creative activities (paint, write, photograph, etc.).

Here I stopped reading and sat and thought for quite a while.

The key words are spare time. What do they mean?

To a working person—supermarket checker, lawyer, highway crewman, housewife, cellist, computer repairer, teacher, waitress—spare time is the time not spent at your job or at otherwise keeping yourself alive, cooking, keeping clean, getting the

Reviews for No Time To Spare

[davisfamily-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Most of these essays were witty and informative. I enjoyed those about her cat the best. I also loved the fact that she spoke about aging in practical terms, and with mostly joy.

[tommcgreevy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In turns poetic, cantankerous, thoughtful, funny, Le Guin tears through what she wishes to discuss with short bursts of energy. Often it feels for the reader like the staccato drumming of rain on a tin roof. Unrelenting, until the storm itself passes. Her essays can be critical and uncompromising, but under all of that is thoughtfulness, and knowledge harvested from a long life well lived.

[andy5185 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

No surprise at all that it would be Ursula K. Le Guin that would pull me out of a crappy headspace. I am grateful for this little collection that charmed me during the ongoing hours of isolation.

[vwinsloe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In her essays in this book, LeGuin shows herself to be a nice cat-loving old lady, a cranky octogenarian, a really sharp observer and thinker, and a beautiful writer, by turns.This is one of those rare books that should be judged not based on how much you get out of the book, but how much the book gets out of you. I didn't relate to everything in this book of short blog posts. For example, I have no knowledge of or interest in opera or classical music, so those posts didn't work for me. But the ones that did interest me kept me thinking for days afterward. They are all very, very short.

[dokfintong · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Selected blog posts. Amusing and sharp ideas from a very good writer at the end of her life.

[mykl8s · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is one I read some time ago and cannot recall enough about to review. It's hard to fault Le Guin, though.

[jennybeast · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had no idea going into this book what it might look like. It turns out to be a book of adapted blog posts, and a stirring and wonderful book at that. I love how it is organized, with Le Guin's uncompromising voice telling us what she thinks of the world leavened by stories about her darling cat. The cat stories almost universally made me laugh. Pard is quite the adventurer, and Le Guin could spin a story out of a piece of paper dropping to earth. Anyway, one of my favorite things about this book is that Le Guin is old when she wrote it and she's extremely honest about how much being old sucks. She doesn't hide her gradual decline, or her pain, or try to pretend to be anywhere other than where she is -- an elderly woman, sharp minded, gradually losing the battle of physical age, and looking, unflinching, at her mortality. We may all be so brave.

[judygibson-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

short pieces, several interesting. Quick read.

[murderbydeath · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ursula K. Le Guin in her latter days kept a blog and this book collects a sample of her posts. She writes about her cat, about joy, about the challenges of aging, about whatever comes to mind. These essays, for that is what they are, are personal essays and filled with Le Guin's sharp insights, sense of humor (more than one had me laughing out loud) and frankness. I plan on reading through her blog archives, which are still on line,

[clrichm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

She was brilliant, and her words were nothing short of sparkling, even in the utterance of the driest sarcasm. I especially enjoyed the passages about aging, which were full of honesty and demanded respect and acknowledgment. Just perfect.

[seschend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Essay/blog post collection that reads with great voice and character that made me miss Ursula Le Guin all the more

[juliestielstra · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I can only join the chorus of other Goodreaders who loved this. Please skip Karen Joy Fowler's precious, pretentious introduction, ("tongue-gapedly"? Seriously?) and go straight to the first sentence, where she landed me instantly: "I have been inspired by Jose Saramago's extraordinary blogs..." Any friend of Saramago's is a friend of mine. This is LeGuin's foray into blog posts - essays for the modern era. Some rambling, some polished, some feel like the writer simply thinking through her fingers, and every one of them carrying some incisive, wry, clear-eyed, thoughtful idea or question. On old age: "The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time... I still don't know what spare time is because all my time is occupied... it's occupied by living.... None of this is spare time. I can't spare it... I am going to be eighty one next week. I have no time to spare." On her cat Pard (if you are a cat lover, you will love these pieces too - if not, you probably won't): "He fixated on me to begin with...though he's gaining more independence, which is good - if I wanted to be the center of the universe I'd have a dog." She can be scathing: "A question from New Bookends: "Where is the great Americannovel by a woman?"... there's something coy and coercive about the question itself that made me want to charge into the bullring, head down and horns forward...Where is the great American novel by anybody? And I'd answer that: "Who cares?" Which is footnoted by the wonderful aside of Peruvian bullfighters training on cows: "After las vacas bravas, the bulls were easy. An angry bull goes for the red flag; an angry cow goes for the matador." She is feminist, she is contrarian (arguing strongly against the idea that childhood innocence is pure, perfect and a tragedy to lose, and in favor of growth, learning, development and hopefully wisdom... an approach with which Philip Pullman would surely agree). In almost every essay, I felt the wish to write to her, to ask her more, to tell her a story of my own (I've got a snake story not as good as "First Contact," but I think she'd have liked it). The world is a richer place for LeGuin's imagination, humaneness and compassion. And a poorer place without her in it.

[thomaspluck · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a collection of blog posts. but in her hands even a blog post is wonderful reading.

[grandpahobo_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a very nice compendium of blog posts and commentary by Le Guin. The only reason I didn't give it five stars is that several of the pieces are about her cat, and I'm not a cat person :)

[bragan_8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A collection of short essays -- originally blog posts -- from the late, great Ursula Le Guin. These cover a wide variety of topics: aging, writing, feminism, the state of the world, the antics of her cat, how to eat a soft-boiled egg. Some are serious, some slightly playful, a few just a little bit curmudgeonly, but, unsurprisingly, they're always thoughtful and well-written.

[danielstj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is my first Le Guin book. It is an appeasing and intriguing piece of non-fiction that has short, sometimes anecdotal, pieces about the nature of things, personal observations, and explorations. I found it to be well thought out and written with poise and tacit style.

Overall, a good read.

3.5

[waldhaus1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Although an started her blog later in life it provides enjoyable insights into her life. The stories of her life with her cat were fun although I am far from a cat person. Hearing her expound on her fascination with words was fun.

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't read much sci-fi or fantasy, so LeGuin has never been on my favorites list. But this collection of essays on various subjects (from the author's blog) really hit a lot of my sweet spots. What a mind...I'll bet she was usually the smartest person in the room, but never flaunted it. She covers things like the truth about getting old (don't say "it's not for sissies" and stop telling people they're only as young as they feel); the uselessness of swear words that appear five times in one sentence; the inanity of surveys, even those conjured up at Harvard; the narrative gift; and best of all--"The Annals of Pard". Once in a while I found myself disagreeing with her, but she was smarter than I am, so I'm OK with that. I don't mean I grant that she's probably right and I'm wrong, just that I'm fine with an intelligent person holding an opinion I don't share. Once or twice I found I couldn't quite follow her reasoning, and because she was smarter than I am, I think she may have left out a logical step or two that was obvious to her, but not to me. Wish I could sit down and talk to her about those bits.

[jbd1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely loved these short essays and blog posts, which at multiple points had me laughing out loud and also drew the tears a time or two as well. From cats to anger to music to aging ... I would happily read Ursula Le Guin's musings on just about anything.

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ursula K. Le Guin, inspired by a blog written by an aging, Jose Saramago, began her own blog in 2010. This is a collection of the best of those essays. Musings, about old age, the state of the union, her cats, literature and various other observations, expressed with sharp intelligence and wit. I have to admit, I am a bit under-read in the Le Guin canon but I hope to catch up with this immensely talented American author. LeGuin does not narrate the audio, but the woman that performs, captures her tone perfectly.

[liscarey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, who was one of our great American writers, and great science fiction and fantasy writers. Her many awards include being named a Grand Master in 2003, by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

The essays were written as blog posts for the Book View Cafe blog, and range over a wide variety of subjects, including fan letters from children, the differences among fact, myth, and lies especially when talking to children, eating an egg, her cat Pard, both when she first adopted him, and as he matured and become a real and important personality in her home.

She says very little directly about politics, but the basic outline of her views is clear, as are her views on eating an egg, or finding her way in places where the streets are twisty and untrustworthy. She talks about the somewhat uncomfortable experience of having to hire a secretary, when her career had reached the point where she unavoidably needed help managing her correspondence.

She doesn't talk much about her writing, here, but this is a fascinating look inside the mind of a wonderful writer. Throughout these essays, she's thoughtful, insightful, funny and kind.

Very much recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is not a collection of essays but rather a collection of posts from Le Guin's blog, and as such, they lack the sense of polish or significance that an essay might impart. But they do showcase the precision of language that makes Le Guin such a satisfying writer, and there are several gems in here. As in her other nonfiction, Le Guin seems to be at her most insightful when discussing literature and women. One of my favorite selections, for instance, combined the two in an examination of the yin and yang of utopian/dystopian fiction. I also greatly appreciated her insights into Homer. Toward the end, the writing becomes more poetic, introspective, and--as I was reading this in honor of Le Guin's life and her impact on me as a reader--bittersweet. One essay on soft-boiled eggs almost brought me to tears. An uneven collection, but certainly a worthwhile one.

[dasam-5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How much I already miss Ursula Le Guin. Her fantasy and sci-fi novels explore what it means to be a human, to be gendered, to live with a natural world instead of against it. This collection of essays from her blog are more personal--and leave me with the illusion that I knew her or at least the wish that she had been my neighbor. Here we watch the natural world together. Here I listen to her thoughts on politics and science vs belief and find myself nodding.

Whether you are already an avid reader of Le Guin or if you are not a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, this collection is thogh-provoking, full of heart and joy, and a joy to read.

[abycats_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Several of the essays at the beginning were so on point and provocative about life as an older woman that they made my almost 70yo self nod and ponder. They more than offset other essays later in the volume that don’t speak to me at all later. Love her essays about their cat Pard. And, of course, whether the topic is of interest or not, everything is impeccably written.

[jen6e6moore · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A delightful collection of blog posts on a variety of subjects, large and small, handled with Le Guin's characteristic grace and wisdom.

[john.cooper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Le Guin in her eighties, as evidenced by the blog entries that make up this collection, was still smarter than nineteen out of twenty pundits, and pithier than ninety-nine out of a hundred. Having decades of practice in truth-telling both in nonfiction and fiction, she arrived at old age's let-those-who-are-troubled-be-damned candor better prepared than the average grandparent to rant effectively and be listened to. The pieces here are not always weighty--there's quite a lot about her cat--but they are refreshing. Some are about art, some about politics, some about the confusion of thought surrounding things of fact and things of faith. And, of course, some are just musings about whatever was on her mind when it was time to write another entry. There is a charming chapter about Delores Pander, whom Le Guin hired to answer her mail for many years; she was the wife of Henk Pander, a fine painter here in Portland. The book is full of all kinds of surprises, and feels intimate in a way that's a bit sad so soon after Le Guin's death in January 2018.

[quondame · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love spending time with Ursula K. Le Guin's writing and ideas. This book is full of short pieces, blog posts, about her thoughts and the incidents in the last few years of her life. Her refusal to accept what passes for truths in American so-called ideology can be refreshing and/or disturbing. Just approaching 70 I too feel I have no spare time.

[hardlyhardy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Just a matter of days after acquiring Ursula K. Le Guin's “No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters,” I saw that the author had died. She died on Jan. 22 at the age of 88. Truly she didn't have time to spare.The author of more than a score of novels, mostly science fiction, and several books of poetry, Le Guin turned to blogging when she reached her 80s. It was a way to stay in the writing game, but with short essays rather than an exhausting book, a book she might never live to finish. This book collects the best of her blog.Her book's title comes from the last line of its first essay, one called "In Your Spare Time." This was triggered by a questionnaire she received from Harvard for her 60th class reunion. (She actually graduated from Radcliffe in 1951, but Radcliffe was affiliated with Harvard.) One question asked what she did in her spare time.Le Guin reflects on how the meaning of the phrase "spare time" changes as one ages. For younger people it means "leisure time," whatever time is left after work and after household chores and parenting and other responsibilities are taken care of. At some point, after retirement, virtually all time becomes leisure time, meaning people can use their time however they wish. At least this seems true in theory, however untrue it may be in practice. Yet because time grows short as we age, there really is none to spare.From there Le Guin goes on to tackle a variety of subjects, some relating to aging, others to literature, nature, her cat and, in one of her most entertaining pieces, putting our soldiers in camouflage. "I find it not only degrading but disturbing that we dress our soldiers in clothes suitable to jail or the loony bin, setting them apart not by looking good, looking sharp, but by looking like clowns from a broken-down circus."As for her cat, she writes about Pard more than any other topic: how she got him, how he misbehaves only when he has an audience, how he catches mice but doesn't know what to do with them, and so on. Another essay focuses on a much bigger cat, a captive lynx that captivates her.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In 2010, after discovering that author Jose Saramago had started a blog, Le Guin decides that she too could express herself in that medium. Here is collected a few dozen of her posts from 2010-2014, covering diverse topics such as getting old, writing, responding to fan letters, observations of her cat Pard, and the delight of soft-boiled eggs.As a fantasy fan, I couldn't help but have heard of Le Guin though this is my first introduction to her works. I've most often seen her quoted in defending genre fiction (particularly science fiction and fantasy) as not being secondary to more literary fiction beloved by critics, so I knew I liked her. In this collection, though I often didn't agree with her political statements, I found much food for thought and enjoyed her way of expressing herself whether she was definite about something ("Old age is for anybody who gets there.") or grappling with questions ("What is the way to use anger to fuel something other than hurt, to direct it away from hatred, vengefulness, self-righteousness, and make it serve creation and compassion?"). The descriptions of her cat were especially delightful to me, and interspersed in some of the heavier topics were a respite and made it easier for me to keep reading "one more essay..." before putting the book down.