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A review by savaging
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
3.0
This was a book I liked talking about more than reading. Which means it's a book of ideas, a political essay in story-form. And though it's too complex to be purely didactic, it still suffers from some of the dryness attendant on a Pilgrim's Progress adventure.
Or maybe it's because if you unmoor me from both space and time all at once and so drastically, it's impossible for me to suspend disbelief enough to enter the story. If we're both far from earth and far from the present, nobody would be wearing shirts or walking on grass, no one would say these words or have these relationships -- my forebrain maintains that a book from that kind of otherness wouldn't be legible, and so rejects all this familiarity. I most like Le Guin when she stays close to home.
Or maybe it's because if you unmoor me from both space and time all at once and so drastically, it's impossible for me to suspend disbelief enough to enter the story. If we're both far from earth and far from the present, nobody would be wearing shirts or walking on grass, no one would say these words or have these relationships -- my forebrain maintains that a book from that kind of otherness wouldn't be legible, and so rejects all this familiarity. I most like Le Guin when she stays close to home.