Reading this Week

An old book by Ursula Le Guin 

As I read Ursula Le Guin’s space travel book The Dispossessed, my mind was filled with the
images from the real trip around the moon that took place last month. I picture the story by imagining the view of the earth from near the moon in this live photo, transmitted by the astronauts. However, I didn’t really enjoy Le Guin’s carefully composed details of 1974 era space fiction, and didn’t finish reading it.

A New Book by Francis Spufford

Nonesuch: A Novel by Francis Spufford interests me because I enjoyed one of this author's earlier books, Cahokia Jazz, which is an alternate-history-detective novel. At the time: December 2024, I wrote a very brief review: "What would the area around St. Louis (where I grew up) be like if all post-European-arrival history had been different? Here's a speculative -- and suspenseful-- fiction about the answer." Now I’m reading Spufford’s next book, and it’s amazing and quite different. I’ll post a review of it when I finish reading.

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