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Always Coming Home
by

Ursula K. Le Guin,

Todd Barton (Composer),

Margaret Chodos-Irvine (Illustrator)

Ruby's review

Feb 01, 2022

it was amazing

bookshelves: 2022, favorites

I read in another review for Always Coming Home that the book may not be Le Guin’s best novel, but certainly her most novel, and I couldn’t have said it better myself; consisting of prose narratives, poems, myths, dramas, customs, maps, a glossary, an alphabet and even food recipes of the Kesh (the fictional people the book is about), Le Guin has created a book that isn’t like the page turners where you can’t stop, but one that invites you to participate and exercise the muscle of your imagination. You have to engage with the story yourself, not sit and experience it like a movie from afar. It isn’t necessarily always an easy sort of engagement, but the things she leaves you with to contemplate are endlessly rewarding. Even in the section of the book that is a linear history - the story of Stone Telling - I found my experience of reading it much unlike other stories. Learning about and engaging with the ideas and ways of the Kesh from the other anthropological accounts and sections of the book connected me in a much deeper way with her narrative.
Nothing is superficial in Always Coming Home - within all of Le Guin’s work, she finds over and over that sense of what’s happening in the world that touches us, and in Always Coming Home she hands it to us again in her wonderful creation of the Kesh.

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Quotes Ruby Liked

“When I take you to the Valley, you’ll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late in the rainy season, and maybe you’ll say, “There it is, that’s it!” But I’ll say. “A little farther.” We’ll go on, I hope, and you’ll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats, a buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shadows of a creek in the dry season, and maybe you’ll say, “Let’s stop here, this is it!” But I’ll say, “A little farther yet.” We’ll go on, and you’ll hear the quail calling on the mountain by the springs of the river, and looking back you’ll see the river running downward through the wild hills behind, below, and you’ll say, “Isn’t that the Valley?” And all I will be able to say is “Drink this water of the spring, rest here awhile, we have a long way yet to go and I can’t go without you.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

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