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Loading... Always Coming Home (1985)by Ursula K. Le Guin
  
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 mmparker | Oct 24, 2023 |    ) cuentosalgernon | Jun 22, 2020 | It has the added benefit of music to go along with it. She creates a world that is believable and real. Read this instead of 5th Sacred Thing. I don't care if that makes me a terrible Pagan. It's a terrible book. (  ) Mary_Beth_Robb | Feb 4, 2020 | This felt a lot like the reading I did for my ancient civilization classes in college, but here Ursula K. Le Guin was doing the work of an entire people. I expect I'll be thinking a lot about the folks living in the Valley in the future. What have I been thinking about already? Here's some The portrayal of the Dayao is flatter than that of the Urrastians in the Dispossessed, I think. Maybe there just wasn't as much time to develop them - and maybe some of it is just how Stone Telling talks about her life. The way Le Guin uses language and metaphor to shape a world-view is fascinating (& very self-aware). Examples include referring to all entities in the world as "people," or the way the Kesh identify "giving" and "wealth," or the way that one's child "makes someone a parent." I wonder if she read that Lakoff book. Reading this book in 20 minute bursts on the MTA is a funny situation to be in. One of my favorite quotes is from the introduction to the appendix: "Things from here on will be just as fictional, but more factual, although equally true." I think it captures the way she's been playing with fact and fiction and meaning and language throughout the whole book. ( )1  haagen_daz | Jun 6, 2019 | This is not a novel, and expecting it to follow the conventions of that form will lead to disappointment. There's a fourteen page glossary, several hundred pages of songs, poems, and novel excerpts from the Valley culture, even extracts from the galactic computer system of the future about the Valley. And there are wonderfully meta moments, like this interchange between Pandora the anthropologist and her interview subject, a librarian of the Valley people:
This is a complex work, and I know I didn't get all of it--if I read this many times, I think I would understand something new, or differently, every time. (  ) wealhtheowwylfing | Feb 29, 2016 | no reviews | add a review
Is expanded inHas as a student's study guideAwardsNotable Lists
"One of [Le Guin's] most radical novels. . . . Always Coming Home is a study in what a complete and utter rejection of capitalism and patriarchy might look like-for society and for the art of storytelling."-The Millions Reissued for a new generation of readers, Ursula K. Le Guin's magnificent work of imagination, a visionary, genre-crossing story about a future utopian community on the Northern California coast, hailed as "masterly" (Newsweek), "hypnotic" (People) and "[her] most consistently lyric and luminous book" (New York Times). This new edition includes an introduction by Shruti Swamy, author of A House is a Body. Midway through her career, Ursula K. Le Guin embarked on one of her most detailed, impressive literary projects, a novel that took more than five years to complete. Blending story and fable, poetry, artwork, and song, Always Coming Home is this legendary writer's fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. Having survived ecological catastrophe brought on by relentless industrialization, the Kesh are a peaceful people who reject governance and the constriction of genders, limit population growth to prevent overcrowding and preserve resources, and maintain a healthy community in which everyone works to contribute to its well-being. This richly imagined story unfolds through a series of narrated "translations" that illuminate individual lives, including a woman named Stone Telling, who travels beyond the Valley and comes to reside with another tribe, the patriarchal Condor people. With sharp poignancy, Le Guin explores the complexities of the Kesh's unified society and presents to us-in exquisite detail-their lives, histories, adventures, customs, language, and art. In addition to poems and folk tales, Le Guin created verse dramas, records of oral performances, recipes, and even an alphabet and glossary of the Kesh language. The novel is illustrated throughout with drawings by artist Margaret Chodos and includes a musical component-original recordings of Kesh songs that Le Guin collaborated on with composer Todd Barton-bringing this utterly original and compelling world to life. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.9)
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***Group Read: Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin (spoiler thread)
Wikipedia in English
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It's a strange, unsettling, wonderful anthropological study of a people that doesn't exist, but drawing heavily on people who have existed. It's unbelievably rich and thoroughly thought-out (there's a CD of songs and poems, for God's sake). It's also maybe kinda self-indulgent.
If you really like LeGuin, you'll enjoy it.
A strange and painful book to read in October 2017, while the Valley burns. (