{"id":302957,"date":"2025-10-14T15:36:25","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T15:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/302957\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T15:36:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T15:36:25","slug":"ursula-k-le-guins-son-recommends-5-of-her-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/302957\/","title":{"rendered":"Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s Son Recommends 5 of Her Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\u201cHer voice is as familiar to me as my own,\u201d\u00a0says Theo Downes-Le Guin<\/a>, youngest child of hugely influential Portland author Ursula K. Le Guin<\/a>. \u201cThat voice is inside my head while I\u2019m reading.\u201d Most aren\u2019t so fortunate, even if they feel at home in Le Guin\u2019s Earthsea and Hainish universes. Before her death in 2018, Le Guin was unanimously regarded as the leading light of American science fiction. She expanded the genre\u2019s bounds, conveying insights on gender, sexuality, and race, often informed by cultural anthropology, feminism, Taoism, and psychoanalysis\u2014themes she continued in her numerous essays, poems, and children\u2019s books. While curating an exhibition of his mother\u2019s life and work, A Larger\u00a0Reality<\/a>, at Oregon Contemporary (October 31, 2025\u2013February 8, 2026), Theo shared a few favorites.<\/p>\n

Catwings<\/p>\n

1988\u20131999<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A four-book children\u2019s series illustrated by S. D. Schindler. The basic concept is a family of cats who have wings. Why and how is never explained, and it\u2019s not important. Some humans they encounter can understand and accept cats with wings. Others can\u2019t, and they put the cats at risk because they keep othering them. In my experience, every kid can see something about themselves in these books, in the same way that they inevitably project themselves into A Wizard of Earthsea\u2014as they are intended to, as we are intended to.<\/p>\n

Steering the Craft<\/p>\n

1998 (revised in 2015)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I think Ursula felt like, if you want to understand\u00a0how another writer writes, read their writing, not necessarily what they wrote about their writing. But as she started teaching more, and refined her pedagogical life and skills, that led her to the notion that it might be a good idea to codify some of that. Chapter headings are \u201cThe Sound of Your Writing,\u201d \u201cPunctuation and Grammar,\u201d \u201cSentence Length and Complex Syntax.\u201d There are also examples of texts she admires\u2014Jane Austen, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf.<\/p>\n

Lavinia<\/p>\n

2008<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Her last novel. She said it was the book that best contained and represented everything that was important to her, which is not surprising given where it came in her career, in her life. It\u2019s about a minor character in Virgil\u2019s Aeneid. Lavinia gets such short shrift as a woman\u2014she\u2019s pivotal, but only has a few lines. Ursula gives Virgil a legitimately tough time for how he kind of disappears her. In some ways, the project is about breathing a full character into this woman who was mostly ignored. But Ursula was someone who identified first as a poet and second as a prose writer, and who loved Virgil. So this is a love letter to Virgil as well.<\/p>\n

No Time to Spare<\/p>\n

2017<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A selection of her blog writings. She did 130 posts, starting in 2010,\u00a0inspired by Jos\u00e9 Saramago\u2019s blog, which he started when he was 85. People who knew Ursula, or who know her work well, know humor and silliness are big components of her writing. Most people don\u2019t think of her that way, though. So it\u2019s nice to point to places where the humor is right there on the surface. We get occasional complaints that the audiobook was not read by Ursula, which I completely sympathize with\u2026it\u2019s so much her voice. So we are actually working on a podcast version\u2014with a different reader for each post (friends, acquaintances, peers).<\/p>\n

So Far So Good<\/p>\n

2018<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Her most posthumous book, if you will. She sent in the revised manuscript on January 15 and died on January 22. You would think, given the timing and the titles of the poems, that it would be very elegiac, but it\u2019s not especially. It\u2019s the work of an older artist, and there is some sense of transition, but not necessarily of ending. Poetry was how she found her way into writing, and it was how she found her way through the difficulty of no longer having the energy for a novel. The last published piece she wrote was for a poetry collection benefiting an animal rights charity. It\u2019s a short, funny little poem about a cat. So many poems. I\u2019m still finding them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cHer voice is as familiar to me as my own,\u201d\u00a0says Theo Downes-Le Guin, youngest child of hugely influential…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":302958,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-302957","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115373263564820578","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}