your favorite Le Guin

A couple weeks ago I reported on a survey of readers' favorite Tolkien novels, and since I was focusing on Le Guin for my trip to her museum exhibit, I might as well consider favorites in that area also.

I found a Reddit thread and another on this topic, and toted up the results. Much more widespread than with Tolkien; I found a total of 17 books chosen, not counting a few people who preferred to choose individual short stories. But the favorite seemed to be The Left Hand of Darkness, followed by The Lathe of Heaven and The Dispossessed. I'm pleased to see The Dispossessed high up; for a while back there I considered it, if not the best, the most under-rated major Le Guin novel. As for Lathe, I rather have the distinct impression that it got a lot more attention after the 1980 PBS dramatization than before.

But while I like all these books, my favorite is Always Coming Home. Like just about everybody on the Reddit threads who named it, my reaction on first reading it was to be blown away in amazement.

New work by an author or artist who's already a favorite of yours can be a challenge. The existing work you've absorbed, you know it well and it's a part of you. The new work you haven't, and my experience is that it often seems a bit inferior at first, even if on absorbing it fully you conclude that it's their best yet.

Only thrice in my experience with a currently-working author or artist whose work I already loved passionately, have I encountered a new work which so dazzled me on first encounter that I immediately concluded that this was their masterwork to date, better than anything that preceded it. Nor have subsequent events changed my mind. One of these was Steeleye Span's setting of "Tam Lin". One was Donald E. Westlake's Kahawa. The third was Always Coming Home.

I've written before, for instance here, about how, when I headed the local group to run Mythcon three years after ACH's publication and had Ursula as Guest of Honor, we constructed the entire convention around a celebration of that book, so I won't go into that more here.

Instead, I'll note some supplementaries. The books which originally sold me on Le Guin as an author I'd like were A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. I picked those up in a library, I think, and saw the map of Earthsea and the diagram of the tombs (only in early editions, I find) and recognized their similarity to maps I'd drawn myself to occupy tedious hours in the classroom. "This author has seen within my soul," I thought, and that began a permanent association.

I also have a sneaking fondness for The Beginning Place, because I think I'm one of the few readers to have figured out the real purpose of that book. It's often criticized, but what the critics cite as a flaw is actually the point.

As for Le Guin short stories, I think my favorite is "Direction of the Road," for the sheer unusualness of its viewpoint.