Maybe I'm biased against this book because I was required to read it for school, but most of the other books we have read I have loved. This one just annoyed me. It seemed like when you read it there were always certain parts in the book that just didn't need to be there. Filler. If I had taken out all the filler in this book, it would have been at least half as thick. Maybe I'm just not into these kinds of books (although I like most books no matter what they're about), but I found it hard to focus on because of all the unnecessary information, and kind of boring. I personally do not recommend this book.

In a genre dominated by 800+ page tomes, the Earthsea books are a refreshing and delightful change. Ursula Le Guin is a master of flowing, lyrical prose. Each book is relatively brief, but chock full of all the elements that are required for a great fantasy story. She accomplishes this feat by keeping things simple and uncluttered. She doesn't need an appendix to list all the characters and their relation to one another. Her world is well-realized, her characters well-fleshed out, and the story captures you from the first pages. Take a break from the massive tales of Jordan and Martin et al. (not that there's anything wrong with them) and read an author whose writing is as magical as her story.

Similar to Harry Potter...The boy who goes to wizard school is not liked in the town. Most people in the town do not understand magic or have powers, but the magical people go to the wizard school. Very transporting and trancendent.
This book is part of a trilogy. Writer is Ursula K. LeGuin The other two books are about magic as well.
I liked Harry Potter better, however.

Always Coming Home, by Ursula LeGuin, is a striking and highly readable Utopian novel with feminist themes. LeGuin wrote this work in 1985, and became so wrapped up in the World she created that she published the book with tapes of songs and ceremonies from its supposed inhabitants. This did not help sales, and the book, although very well reviewed at the time and much beloved by its fans, is no longer in print. In the distant future California is inhabited by a people with a culture similar to American Indians, current U.S. culture having polluted itself to death and fallen into the sea just as everyone predicted. These Napa Valley people have profited from Silicon Valley and combine modern computer skills with a simplicity of life close to nature. There is, however, a troublesome, warmaking, male-dominated, city-building culture to the north where Oregon and Washington are now, and this is where the culture clashes come from that allow feminist issues to be developed. The gentle Californians have e-mail, and a group safely far away from the community that is suffering raids and town burnings from the Arab-like northern people keep writing our community that fighting back is wrong, and that they should sit down with these people and discuss things and settle it all by peaceful talking; in a memorable line, someone in the embattled community flames back, "You come here and do that!" Our protagonist, North Owl, is captured by the Arab-like culture as a teenage girl. When she finds her way back after much oppression and many adventures, she takes the second of three names women take to mark major life themes, Woman Coming Home.

Ursula K. LeGuin's novel Always Coming Home, published in 1985, is a story of our own earth in the distant future. Ms. le Guin has set her novel in what is today the small community of Rutherford , in the western Napa Valley of Northern California. Nothing remains of twentieth-century civilization except an occasional piece of rubble and some areas poisoned by residual pesticide. Much of our present-day land is under water, including California's Central Valley and some of the coastal region, and the human population is sparse.

However, the tone of the book is neither cautionary nor obtrusively alien; the topography, plants and animals of Northern California are easily recognizable, and the human culture--the people are the Kesh, or "Valley People"--although different from our own, is not jarringly so.

The book is the story of one woman's life, from childhood to old age. North Owl is born in Sinshan, one of the nine small communities in the Valley of the Na (our Napa River

This book is a marvelous collection of "an anthropology of the future." LeGuin excavates stories, songs, beliefs, myths, traditions, and more of the people who "will be might have been" someday living in what is now Northern California. At once Utopian and Dystopian, the culture that LeGuin shares with us is beautiful and complex.

I read this book when it was first published in paperback in the mid-80's. It planted and nurtured in me a seed of hope that humans are capable of someday living in community in different ways than we do now. It opened in my imagination doors that I had never before noticed. Here is an example of a new narrative structure, or anti-structure. Here, too, is an example of a new-old social structure, a post-modern tribalism that has returned to "traditional" values such as living in harmony with oneself and one's environment, and recognizing the strength and beauty in ritual and tradition.

Though others (including she) may disagree, I personally have always considered this work Mrs. LeGuin's crowning achievement. As Tolkien did in his Middle Earth stories, LeGuin in "Always Coming Home" creates a new-old world that is unfamiliar yet recognizable, someplace we want to go back to again and again. We are lucky indeed that this book is now back in print!

It's fun to resurrect these old novels. The story CITY OF ILLUSIONS is misnamed; it should have been CITY OF LIES. The Shing aliens are the best liars ever and have the ability to mindlie telepathically to take control of earthlings minds. They meet their match, however in Falk-Ramarren, the split brained super hero who the story is all about. The females in the story are all pawns as are most of the other characters. However if the travails of one earthling's struggles to regain his lost mind is your cup of tea then this story is very engrossing.

The three stories are all tied together by small, small threads. Sometimes that was what made them so interesting to read -- finding how it all fit together. Not necessarily happy stories, but engaging with good characters.

With a unique style LeGuin was able to used a time tested theme and write a successfull story. Though it lacks an antagonist, which is one of the novels strengths, the story's focus on Falk's inner conflict and search for answers is quiet well writen. I recommend this novel specifically for young readers.

It's too bad that most booksellers automatically, and mistakenly, placed this lovely "mainstream" historical novel in the science fiction section with the rest of Le Guin's work. It deserved a wider audience than it probably received.

However...I wonder how many other Le Guin fans have noticed that MALAFRENA (written five years later) is essentially the same novel as THE DISPOSSESSED, its setting moved from a distant planet in the distant future, to an imaginary (but oh so real) country in early-19th-century Eastern Europe? In both cases the story is of an idealistic young man who leaves his home because he burns for action and his secure but flawed home seems unbearable to him; goes to the decadent home planet/decadent big city that he believes is where he truly belongs, in order to chase his dreams and shake things up; finds himself in over his head in events he can't control; and eventually returns home chastened, more mature, and (rather like Dorothy) willing to admit that his heart's desire had never really been farther than his own back yard.

But it's an absorbing tale, written with Le Guin's usual beautiful prose and perceptive characterization; and a fine portrayal of post-Napoleonic Europe and the revolutionary stirrings of the 1820s and 1830s--a good history lesson even though the country of Orsinia never existed except in our imaginations.

When this book was first published there was considerable hoopla to the effect that Le Guin had ceased to be "just" a "genre" writer of science fiction and fantasy but was now a "mainstream" writer appealing to a broader audience. I don't get it! Where is the line drawn between a so-called "historical novel" about an imaginary country (Malafrena)and a "fantasy" novel (like "The Dispossessed") about imaginary planets? Is the distinction so significant that solely on this basis it creates an appeal to a broader, mainstream audience? As a previous reviewer here pointed out, those two novels are very similar in their plotting and echo Le Guin's themes and story lines: the nature and meanings of freedom or other idealistic obsessions; depth of anthropological detail; cultural shock or clashes; coming of age; the changes, understandings and growth that come through noble efforts, love or loss; and the compromises the characters make as a result of their various vicissitudes. Her conclusions are always bittersweet: the characters make peace with their lot and find strength to continue and an indication of some kind of future.

LeGuin's prose is beautifully crafted, evocative, fraught with meanings, dense, wide-angled, many sided. Her works need to be read and reread to grasp some of what they hold. Le Guin is our George Eliot, and Malafrena is another Middlemarch. It would be more meaningful, however, if it were based on the actual history of an actual country. Her fascinating details, plotting and descriptions would gain significance as interpretations of, and insights on, real events.

Since the work was imaginary, I wish her female characters had been made stronger; that they had prevailed more. I understand she intended for them to echo in some part the feminist spirit of the sixties, but nevetheless they were trapped by their society, helpless and subordinate to the men who controlled them. Luisa was neurotic, hateful and unhappy; Laura lived an empty, dominated life, and Piera had to choose between marrying the widower she loved or the "freedom" of taking charge of the management of her family estate. At the conclusion Itale thought her plain; past her prime, a dried up sterile stick, and she told him they could be friends only if they understood they would never marry. Perhaps the reader is meant to read a good deal into the ending, about their unstated future happiness and Itale's return to pursue his old dream, but for me it had to be more clearly spelled out.

Leguin's Orsinian tales include the story collection with that title, additional stories from the Compass Rose and Wind's Twelve Quarters collections, and this full-length novel. According to the interview in McCaffrey's Across the Wounded Galaxies, this imaginary-country mode preceded both her Hainish-cycle science fiction and Earthsea fantasies, Malafrena having been begun before she wrote her first sci-fi novellas, but finished only after she had won the national and international sci-fi awards for her first full-length novel in the Hainish mode. She says in the interview (b) that she turned to science fiction when she was told that her imaginary country was unmarketable, and (a) that it took the arrival of the women's movement circa 1970 for her to see her way to completing this book by doing justice to its several major female characters. Since I read that, it's seemed to me that the climactic scene is Piera's lakeside reverie at Christmas; and that the final resolution between her and Itale is just the most brilliant thing: you can't know what will happen, but you can know that it'll be that good whatever.

I've learned more and better European history from Leguin's Orsinian tales, especially Malafrena, than from Gibson and Sterling's Difference Engine--not really a fair comparison, but still. My advice, if you're any kind of Leguin fan, don't let any preconceptions at all get in your way, where Malafrena or its lesser corollaries are concerned. I keep thinking she'll write another novel that will do for Orsinia what Tehanu did for Earthsea, but I'm still waiting--and still fervently hoping that I won't be permanently disappointed.

I believe that the ones who walk away from omelas take a look inside themselves and discover that their happiness is not worth sacrificing another human life. The event of the Festival of Summer is about a celebration of life and yet they are sacrificing one life for the happiness of the town.

Who among us has not experienced the misery of long waits at airports, trapped in a slow-moving time-warp between flights? Le Guin starts this quaint book with a horribly accurate word picture of what such a wait can be before segueing into a neat fantasy. Imagine if, just as we change airplanes on connecting flights, we could switch between different planes of existence (the pun is entirely intentional!) and discover alternate worlds? Sit back then for an enchanting ride as Le Guin lets her imagination create 16 wondrous alternate worlds which this book explores almost like a travelogue. Take the world of the Asonu, where children speak less and less as they mature, till as adults, their communication is entirely silent. The only sounds are those of nature and people going about their business - no conversation at all. (I could go for that!). Contrast that peaceful world with that of the Veksi who are always angry and quarrelsome, or the Hennbet who are either reincarnated beings or multiple personalities (or maybe both!). Even more imaginative are the long migratory cycles and courtship dances of the Ansarac (much to the disapproval of the efficient tech-specialists who try to colonize them) and the slow evolution of Mahigul. The book is not all light hearted fun however. Porridge on Islac looks at the dangers of genetic engineering. The land of Hegn, where everyone is part of the royal family and hence all attention is on the one family of commoners, neatly inverts the usual fascination for royalty, enabling Le Guin to gently skewer the monarchical concept. And Great Joy is a searing look at corporate behavioral ethics (or the lack of them). I must also credit the illustrator, Eric Beddows for some very apt images, including a couple that are startlingly reminiscent of the peerless M. C. Escher. A nice read, though very different from what one usually expects from Ursula Le Guin. (I wonder if she dreamed this one up at an airport!)

Alexander Furby is a young kitten who is curious about the world around him. Venturing beyond the garden fence, Alexander finds a world of trees and other creatures, like dogs. Alexander is brave, but not brave enough to claw at the dogs. He scrambles up a tree and waits for help. In the morning, strange help comes from a kitten with wings, one that does not talk. She takes him back to a barn where other cats with wings, her brothers and sisters, live. Alexander finds out from them that her name is Jane. He decides that he wants to do something special for his friend. But what can an ordinary cat do for one with wings?
I thought that this was a cute book, but one for younger people. I gave it three stars because it is really at the reading level of an 7-9 year old.

Alexander is a cat. He is the biggest and the strongest but very bossy. He went off exploring. He was chased by dogs. He got stuck in a tree. One of the catwings (Jane) came to help him. She brought him home to his family. The owner of his family said to Susan that she could keep Alexander. I liked the book because Alexander goes on adventures, He goes to a farm and sees a cow and says to the cow don't say moo say mew. I think you should buy this book if you like cats you will like this book.

I read "Catwings" to my kids and we loved it! And this one is even better. It has the true magical quality that makes a memorable, classic, children's book.

Some wonderful and successful writers gather their thoughts in this book to bear light on the magic of Tolkien's writing. Being a fan myself, I enjoyed the individual tales of discovering "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" for the first time. I related to the same sense of awe and dread, of wonder and inspiration. Surely, Tolkien has inspired many.

Unfortunately, the praise gets to be redundant and--may I say it?--almost hollow, without the balance of some thoughtful criticism. Personally, I wouldn't have much negative to say regarding Tolkien's work, but I found very little that was genuinely fresh or enlightening in this collection of "meditations." I did discover an interest in some of the authors included (not a bad reason for their involvement in the project) and in earlier 20th century writers that I have never familiarized myself with. Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, Fritz Leiber, and Mervyn Peake are only a few of the old standbys mentioned repeatedly.

Although interesting, a quick read, and well-written, this collection might best serve those curious in unearthing the inspiration beneath some of their favorite authors. I was hoping for something with more vitality, but overall I'd recommend the book.

If you're a fan of Tolkien's Middle Earth, this little volume of essays will be a welcome addition. It's refreshing to see how deeply "The Lord of the Rings" effected the contributors; and how, over time, their perceptions of LOTR have changed. My favorites were the submissions of Michael Swanwick, Esther M. Friesner, Robin Hobb, Orson Scott Card and Diane Duane. Douglas A. Anderson and Ursala K. Le Guin offer more cerebral takes on both LOTR and the role of story in our lives -- the eternal rhythums Tolkien tapped while writing his masterpiece. For "Meditations" I offer what I believe is the best praise anyone can offer for a book: It's much too short.

MEDITATIONS ON MIDDLE EARTH is a collection of essays focusing on J.R.R. Tolkien's works, especially the Middle Earth saga. Some of the more renowned fantasy authors of today evaluate the series that made fantasy a household name. Surprisingly, though everyone agrees that Professor Tolkien opened up the genre to the middle class, not all of the contributors are fans of the actual novels. Insightful and entertaining, each essay is well written with the writer's particular spin. However, this anthology will be loved by those readers analyzing the various cultures in a way that cultural anthropologists would envy or by those fans who cherish Beowulf, which Tolkien felt is the forefather of the genre.

Harriet Klausner

Over the years I have always thought of Ursula Le Guin as a very brave and non-conforming sort of person. I have kept her photograph on my wall for the last 15 years. The reason for my admiration was that I felt (and feel) that she is a writer of major talent who decided to enter the field of science fiction and get labelled as a "sci-fi writer" when she could have won many honors and perhaps a more lasting place in history in mainstream literature. Her works do not cater to the broad popular tastes in fiction, but such novels as "The Left Hand of Darkness", "The Lathe of Heaven", "The Dispossessed" and "Always Coming Home" plus her works of juvenile fiction and collections of short stories add up to a body of spectacularly well-written material that is denied its place in the annals of American literature by the peculiar prejudice that segregates certain kinds of fiction into closed cells. I read most of Le Guin's books as soon as they hit the shelves, long ago, before science fiction became reality with the Internet and Amazon.com. For some reason, though I bought THE COMPASS ROSE fifteen years ago, I never got around to reading it till now. I must say that it was largely disappointing. There are some good stories in this collection, stories such as "The New Atlantis" and "The Diary of the Rose", also "The Pathways of Desire" which links exploration of space with dreams, but other stories seem hasty, 'cute' or aimed at the readers of airport fiction. In general, Le Guin is at her best when she creates new worlds or postulates possible futures. Her blend of anthropology and fiction has always thrilled me. As she moves away from that, into more general fiction on the contemporary world, unless she crafts the story carefully, as with "Two Delays on the Northern Line"--a real gem--she loses her edge. Her stories become filled with sunshine, conversing rocks, and whispering leaves, but without much punch. There are twenty stories in THE COMPASS ROSE. Half a dozen are up to her fine standard, others-perhaps the humorous pieces-may please many readers, but a few probably should have been kept in the drawer. (Though if I had written them, I would have been quite proud, no doubt. We are talking quality control here.) If you are wondering where to begin Le Guin, this is not the place. Put it last on your list. But begin, of course.

A good mix of 20 Ursula K. Le Guin short stories, composed of some great sci-fi, good modern fiction, humor, and quite a few UKL-style sureals (Buffalo Gals-style). The stories are all reprints from magazines and anthologies.

Some of the best are "Two Delays on the Northern Line" and "Malheur County", two haunting timeless pieces that talk of life and loneliness. "The Eye Altering" and "The Pathways of Desire" are excellent sci-fi shorts that question the nature of reality and perception. This compilation includes no stories from the Ekumen Cycle.

Although primarily a sci-fi reader, I believe that UKL's fiction including the shorts in The Compass Rose are some of the best pieces of contemporary fiction I know. The sci-fi in this book is a bit limited, but still excellent. All in all, a great way to get introduced to UKL's mainstream fiction, and satisfy your craving for quality sci-fi.

This is my favorite book. The stories are surprising and very enjoyable. Fresh thoughts accompany interesting stories.

Ursula K. Le Guin is my favorite writer. That is why I advise you: do not read this book. It is surely the worst of Le Guin's novels and I hope the author is ashamed of it and wants to forget that she ever wrote it. (But I am not sure if my hope is well located.)

I enjoyed this book. It showed inventive ideas and was very inspirational. I hope you will also read The Word For World is Forest, because it also shows hope for oppressed peoples. I have only read three of her books, but this was by far the best.

While this novel may not rise to the level of her very best work, prose-wise, it nonetheless is well-written--and its explorations of nonviolence, its challenges and the ways in which it can both succeed and fail, were highly influential on me, and have had a long term effect on how I view conflict. This one is well worth reading, and is as worthy of Le Guin's name as any of her better-known works.