I slowed reading at the very end and savored the remaining words, resisting the idea that I’d be done with these essays.
I was caught off guard by Brian Doyle’s fiction, then enamored with his personal essays, and the same thing happened reading Le Guin’s stories and following with this collection of her late-life blog posts.
The grace and measure of her writing amazes me: always clear, careful, and easy to follow, but with great depth and balance. Thoughtful and sometimes sharply critical while somehow being model of humility.
Essays took on a variety of big topics and small personal stories, and I loved all of them. I especially enjoyed the seemingly-benign pieces that, in their last few sentences, revealed themselves to be profound.
Any moment I spend wondering how I could possibly manage to think or write more like Ursula Le Guin is surely a moment well spent, and this book afforded me a lot of them.