No K on this book?
Aug. 22nd, 2005 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threemonkeysAfter reading a John Varley book that did not include any world building based on the impact of technological and sexual development, I thought I should read The Birthday of the World by Ursula Le Guin. There probably should be some explanation about that leap, but if you know the works of Varley and Le Guin, you will know where I'm coming from.
Birthday of the World is a collection of short stories written during the '90s. Now here is the thing about short story collections - variety is really good. Over the years I have read quite a few author's collections which seem to just tell the same story over and over again. Even Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick are guilty of this. It does not matter how good the stories are individually, if an author is plugging away at the same themes over and over it gets tedious. This collection is guilty of that to the extent that I had to take a break half way through and read ASIM 14*. In retrospect, I should have spaced out the stories with bigger gaps between them - the stories were all easily good enough to deserve that. To an extent, the collection was saved from complete singleness of tone by the last story "paradises lost" which deviated from the track quite a bit - I enjoyed it so much more for that.
* Yes![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zarabee, I greatly enjoyed ASIM 14. I have been doling them out sparingly - keeping them for occasions when I need a literary upper.
Birthday of the World is a collection of short stories written during the '90s. Now here is the thing about short story collections - variety is really good. Over the years I have read quite a few author's collections which seem to just tell the same story over and over again. Even Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick are guilty of this. It does not matter how good the stories are individually, if an author is plugging away at the same themes over and over it gets tedious. This collection is guilty of that to the extent that I had to take a break half way through and read ASIM 14*. In retrospect, I should have spaced out the stories with bigger gaps between them - the stories were all easily good enough to deserve that. To an extent, the collection was saved from complete singleness of tone by the last story "paradises lost" which deviated from the track quite a bit - I enjoyed it so much more for that.
* Yes
zarabee, I greatly enjoyed ASIM 14. I have been doling them out sparingly - keeping them for occasions when I need a literary upper.