[hotdogscout]

I have a feeling people who love Le Guin love the idea of her and didn't actually read her books. Her style is impersonal, robotic and kind of boring.

Look at her most famous quotes for a snippet:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/874602.Ursula_K_Le_G...

[teraflop]

Taste is subjective, and if you find her style boring I can't dispute that, but it doesn't match my experience at all.

I think judging her by the most popularly-upvoted snippets on Goodreads is doing her a tremendous disservice. Her language is not particularly flowery, and she writes using simple words, which are often the ones that have the vaguest meanings and the most room for nuance. If you take a single sentence like that from a story or novel, and remove it from its surrounding context, you strip away a lot of that nuance. By reading the sentence in isolation, you only see a pale shadow of its intended meaning.

Maybe this is a bad analogy, but it makes me think of how you wouldn't think there was anything interesting about Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture if all you heard was the cannon volleys by themselves, even though they're what make the piece complete.

[t-3]

I think Earthsea and Hainish are both great, but I don't like any of her other stuff, and don't like this TTC (or really any of the English translations I've seen) either. They all lose the poetry which is obvious at a glance in the original. I only know a few words of Mandarin and can't read the glyphs at all, but I've picked my way through with a dictionary and MTL - the structure of the original is obviously not reflected in any of the English translations. I think English is just too explicit and doesn't have enough "overloading" to capture the depth.

[Barrin92]

A lot of prose in the Dispossessed is great and there's nothing impersonal or robotic about it, quite the opposite.

"We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere"

[djur]

From the same book, the "it is our suffering that brings us together" passage has burned itself into my mind and has often been a comfort in dark times. I can't imagine finding it impersonal or robotic. Frank and unadorned, perhaps. And both of these quotes are spoken by a person who is specifically noted to have a very blunt, concrete way of speaking. She could be more poetical when she chose to be.

[yongjik]

Hard disagree. I find Le Guin's prose breathtakingly gorgeous. And then it hits you like a brick wall.

> The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations—just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got threequarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn’t get well. You couldn’t get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve.

(The Dispossessed)

[nestorD]

I strongly disagree. Her essays (?!) and short story might be a good place to demonstrate the breath and width of her style.

The one exeption to this, for my taste, might be Earthsea, parts of it definitely fell short of its reputation as far as I am concerned.

[SamBam]

I can't imagine anyone loving "the idea" of Le Guin who hasn't read her books. What an idea. It's not like she's famous enough to have acolytes who spout her stuff without having read it. And what's "the idea" of Le Guin? Just that she's a female sci fi writer? I'm missing the implication.

I love her books and have for over 20 years.

And I can't imagine that any author looks good when subjected to the "GoodReads snippets" treatment. Can you find an example of an author coming off well? What snippets get upvoted by people? It's all going to sound like trite stuff, for any author.

[wafflemaker]

Can't say I love any books, but I greatly enjoy sci-fi (especially when they respect orbital mechanics). ULG's style reminds me of Strugacky brothers, maybe that was just typical in that era?

It might be that my memory is playing tricks on me, it was over 10 years since I read any of them (except for one non-sci-fi ULG book). But generally the writing style evolves end deeply personal style is much more common now then it was before. (I think I've read most of ULG and maybe half of B&A Strugackie's books).

[cagenut]

so is KSR's but I still love the worldbuilding and what-if exploration of the scifi.