Reviews and Comments

Booksellers, magic, history, mythology, the 1980s, London, art, architecture…this book truly has an embarrassment of riches. Thoroughly entertaining!

This was my second time reading this. The first time was long ago in school—from which I remembered the general premise, the fact that I liked it, and little else. This time I read it with a reading group. The other members of this group drew my attention to aspects of, and ambiguities in, the book that I might otherwise have missed. It’s a book with a lot of interesting and powerful ideas to ponder. It is also a very entertaining and often funny book. Well worth reading for its place in the history of women’s literature, for its exploration of the history of women in (Western) society, and for its analysis of, and ponderings on, literature in general.

Ursula Le Guin has long been one of my favorite authors. The Dispossessed is quite possibly my favorite science fiction novel. However, I have never been satisfied with how she wrote women. I recall being troubled by her treatment of the female characters in some books, such as The Lathe of Heaven, and puzzled by the almost complete absence of female characters in others.

In Tehanu I am finally satisfied. This is a book about women, and they are fully developed characters who are not filtered through the lens of Le Guin’s concept of the male gaze. And what excellent, complex characters they are. A very fine book.

Overall, this was a really enjoyable book. The main character, Xandri, is a very likeable character who happens to be autistic. She reminds me a bit of October Daye. The characters and their relationships are a big part of the appeal of this book for me. I also appreciate the overarching themes of not othering people--whether those people are neurodivergent humans or non-human beings. The book is a bit more militaristic than I'm really comfortable with, but that's the only significant complaint I would have.

This can be a difficult book. It is largely congruent with my world view, yet even so there were times that I had to stop and engage with ideas that I felt resistance to. It is a hopeful book, which is certainly what we need right now, but, yeah, it's not an easy book.

This book was a lot of fun. I love the found family aspect, and the descriptions of the teas were interesting. I will certainly read the sequel.

Another strong, philosophical, and wise book by Le Guin, which also has its share of adventure.  There's really only one thing that keeps it from being a 5 star book for me.  While that thing is a bit spoilery, which is why I'm not going to specifically name it, it is actually only mentioned a couple of times, and is not particularly important to the book as a whole. Which is why it knocks off only a quarter point.

The vast majority of this book is “humor”, but not any type of humor that I can appreciate. I found it to be a real chore to read this book, and I only persisted in doing so for its historical significance. At least I was rewarded with a final chapter which was devoid of “humor”, and which gave some hints as to what the Roman cults of Isis and Osiris were like. 

A series of semi-autobiographical vignettes about Mari and Jonna. While there were a couple of early chapters that I did not much enjoy, for the most part this is a beautiful and honest book about love, and about creativity. 

It’s mid-nineties cyberpunk. Rather more convoluted and odd than many of its kin. 

This short book is very interesting, perhaps most as a history of organized labor, Anarchism and Syndicalism. It is all the more interesting for having been written during the Spanish Civil War, just before the start of World War II, and for the epilogue, written nine years later, shortly after the end of WWII, which provides an update on the state of Anarcho-Syndicalism in the world at that time. The introduction, with biographical information about Rocker, and the story of how the book came into being, is also valuable. Despite featuring prominently in the subtitle, the theory of Anarcho-Syndicalism gets less attention than the practice.

Quite a page-turner. I have some qualms about certain aspects of the book, but it undeniably kept me engaged. 

The edition that I read was more than 1100 pages, but I never got tired of reading it, or felt like I needed a break. This is in some ways Murakami’s strangest novel, but it is as fascinatingly readable as any of his work. 

An extremely important book. The information and conclusions presented are unlikely to be surprising to any moderately intelligent person who has thought about these issues at all—after all, the evidence that is now available merely supports what was intuitively understood by people at least as far back as the nineteenth century. But having that evidence can be critical in policy debates.