Heya heya

I've put off reading Le Guin's Always Coming Home for years, because I knew I wasn't ready for it. And then I knew that I was, and I loved it to bits, even though I keep waking up faintly depressed to remember that I don't in fact live in a world like that. Never mind, one day we shall have our commonwealth by the sea, where we shall gather to talk about books and cook locally-grown produce and evolve effective consensus-based decision-making processes.

I poked around online for reviews, and found this one which had various interesting things to say, but mostly I wanted to respond to the "flaws" which the review identifies in order to clarify some of my own thinking about the book. Basically, I'm going to gratuitously pick out a few choice quotes and then have a grump about them. Screw consensus-making, let's go with adversarial.

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Oh well, just some reflections, and surely grossly unfair to the reviewer to pick these out of context and then bounce off them. But then I like the end of Tehanu too (reviewer doesn't), so you can happily pay no attention to a word I say. My favourite bit of Always Coming Home, for what it's worth, is the list of "generative metaphors" at the back of the book.