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No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Essays on age, culture, and everyday life

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Awards & Recognition

  • Award recognition

    Hugo Award winner for Best Related Book

    Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Related Book.

AlbakiReads Editorial

Essays on age, culture, and everyday life

Collected from Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog, these short dispatches range across aging, belief, literature, national life, and ordinary experiences such as breakfast. The subjects connect personal reflection with questions about how people understand age, what counts as “escapism,” and what remains to be learned. Le Guin’s remarks on fantasy challenge the idea that imagined worlds are merely an escape, while her reflections on old age take up the practical absurdities of living within a culture that can deny it. Together, the pieces offer a record of the concerns and curiosities she returned to late in life, moving between cultural questions and the details of daily existence.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in essays and literary criticism.
  • Readers curious about Le Guin’s reflections on aging, belief, and literature.
  • Readers who enjoy short pieces that connect everyday observations with cultural questions.

Themes

Aging and cultural perceptions of ageFantasy and escapismLiterature and beliefEveryday life and curiosity

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Related Book and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

"The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them. . . " -- Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review

From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, a collection of thoughts--always adroit, often acerbic--on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation.

Ursula K. Le Guin on the absurdity of denying your age: "If I'm ninety and believe I'm forty-five, I'm headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub."

On cultural perceptions of fantasy: "The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is 'escapism' an accusation of?"

On breakfast: "Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime."

Ursula K. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In the last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined. The collected best of Ursula's blog, No Time to Spare presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: "How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us."

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