I bought a book!
Dec. 27th, 2011 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rscEarth-shaking news, right? Well, the fact is, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jwg and I rarely buy books these days, given that our bookshelves are full and there's an excellent library system at our disposal. But last Thursday I was in Harvard Square doing some last-minute holiday shopping, and I had vague memories of mentions in LJ and elsewhere that there was a recent book by Ursula Le Guin -- one of my favorite authors, and one whose books I prefer to own than to borrow -- so I decided to pop into the Harvard Bookstore (the one remaining independent general bookstore in Harvard Square) to see if they had it. (By the way, the place was absolutely mobbed on Dec. 22, which is on balance probably a good thing, although I wasn't altogether thrilled at the time.)
It took me a while to find the fiction, which is way at the back, but once there I found my way to the Le Guins easily enough, and discovered that I really haven't been paying attention: my eye was first caught by Powers, which I'd certainly never seen before, and then I noticed Gifts, which had an earlier copyright date but the same map in the front matter, and I eventually figured out that they were the first and third of a series set on "The Western Shore" -- the second book, Voices, was not on the Harvard Bookstore's shelves.
So I bought Gifts. I probably should have bought Powers while I was at it, since my reasoning that I should make sure I liked the series before buying any more of it ignored the fact that there was no possibility that anything by Le Guin would fail to engage me. And indeed it's taken major will power for me to keep from inhaling Gifts in one big gulp; it's distressingly short (Powers is much longer, to judge by its thickness). I'll likely finish it today.
She is so good at creating credible worlds with incredible features, and she understands people so well. I could complain that, after providing a map of this extensive piece of world, the action of this book is all confined to one corner of it, of which no detailed map is provided, so that hardly any of the places named in the book are shown on the map, but if there hadn't been any map at all I wouldn't have cared, so never mind.
Now I have to get my hands on Voices. Hmm, I bet I could order it and its successor from that store in Perry...
jwg and I rarely buy books these days, given that our bookshelves are full and there's an excellent library system at our disposal. But last Thursday I was in Harvard Square doing some last-minute holiday shopping, and I had vague memories of mentions in LJ and elsewhere that there was a recent book by Ursula Le Guin -- one of my favorite authors, and one whose books I prefer to own than to borrow -- so I decided to pop into the Harvard Bookstore (the one remaining independent general bookstore in Harvard Square) to see if they had it. (By the way, the place was absolutely mobbed on Dec. 22, which is on balance probably a good thing, although I wasn't altogether thrilled at the time.)It took me a while to find the fiction, which is way at the back, but once there I found my way to the Le Guins easily enough, and discovered that I really haven't been paying attention: my eye was first caught by Powers, which I'd certainly never seen before, and then I noticed Gifts, which had an earlier copyright date but the same map in the front matter, and I eventually figured out that they were the first and third of a series set on "The Western Shore" -- the second book, Voices, was not on the Harvard Bookstore's shelves.
So I bought Gifts. I probably should have bought Powers while I was at it, since my reasoning that I should make sure I liked the series before buying any more of it ignored the fact that there was no possibility that anything by Le Guin would fail to engage me. And indeed it's taken major will power for me to keep from inhaling Gifts in one big gulp; it's distressingly short (Powers is much longer, to judge by its thickness). I'll likely finish it today.
She is so good at creating credible worlds with incredible features, and she understands people so well. I could complain that, after providing a map of this extensive piece of world, the action of this book is all confined to one corner of it, of which no detailed map is provided, so that hardly any of the places named in the book are shown on the map, but if there hadn't been any map at all I wouldn't have cared, so never mind.
Now I have to get my hands on Voices. Hmm, I bet I could order it and its successor from that store in Perry...
