No Time to Spare by Ursula K Le Guin

This book is a collection of meditative essays. I generally avoid them, but Ursula Le Guin has overcome my prejudice with this small and thought-provoking work. Le Guin was-she died last January at the age of 88-a prolific, influential writer of fantasy and science fiction, also a poet. Her awards and prizes are almost too many to count.

Late in life she began writing a blog, and this book is a number her entries. She is an engaging writer, thoughtful, even meditative at times, with strong opinions beautifully expressed with gentleness and civility. The first breath of fresh air for me was when I read the essay in which Le Guin embraces being old. Actually there are several of them. Her clear-eyed rumination on the diminution of being old is heartening.

Le Guin is wonderfully observant of and sensitive to natural things. She learns much from her mostly amicable sharing her home with her cat Pard. She has a marvelous encounter with a rattlesnake in which she and it hold each other in an hypnotic stare for fifteen minutes or so. Both survive the experience. And there is her encounter with a captive lynx. His beauty captures her.

Sometimes Le Guin uses a literary work to power her thinking. My favorite instance is her piece on Homer. She gets him just right, I think. She sees the Trojan War as simply war, not noble but "wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted ...." She calls Achilles (accurately, I think} "a sulky, self-pitying teenager" and a great warrior.

Laced throughout the book are Le Guin's thoughts on sexual politics, about which she taught me much, particularly about the difference between male bonding and female bonding. A strong and thoughtful feminist, she values both, of course.

There is more, a whole lot more, in this small book of short and deep essay.