Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon. Jacobs said, "is that it means you can do just about anything. But despite my lethargy, I wondered at the incongruity of the statement. How could an excess of skill prove anything but a blessing? I didn't have to wait long for an answer. Jacobs continued, "was one of selection: How could he settle on a single style when he performed well in all of them? Le Guin found herself in when collecting the short stories that compose The Compass Rose. In the book's preface, Le Guin admits that "the stories it contains tend to go off each in its own direction.
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A number point toward science fiction, and some of these would have made George Orwell proud. One describes how a tyrannical bureaucracy gets undone by mysteriously rising sea levels "The New Atlantis" and another delves into the secret diary of a lab technician whose job of probing mental patients' minds secretly aids a despotic government "The Diary of the Rose". Others are more lighthearted. But no sooner do you acquaint yourself with the futuristic tack than Le Guin swings you in fantastic and speculative directions. And finally, lest we become too comfortable with genre, The Compass Rose leads to literary pieces, too.
Two men ponder relatives' deaths with radically different results "Two Delays on the Northern Line". A theoretical physicist loses his mind trying to quantify the number of the earth's dead "The Water Is Wide". And an exploratory group composed entirely of South American women becomes the first expedition to reach the South Pole in "Sur". More impressive than Le Guin's range of vision is the skill with which she executes almost every story.
That very range becomes both the collection's bane and blessing. The wildness of subject matter almost guarantees that many won't be to your liking -- and that a few may find your heart's true North. Over the years I have always thought of Ursula Le Guin as a very brave and non-conforming sort of person. I have kept her photograph on my wall for the last 15 years. As we see Rose grow from a child to a plucky adolescent with a flair for theatrics both onstage and at home during verbal boxing matches with her mother, to a poised and prepossessing teenager, she becomes the unwitting emotional tether between Elsie and everyone else.
With an uncanny ability to plunge confidently and unwaveringly into the thoughts and desires of women—mothers, daughters, wives, lovers—John Casey astonishes us again with the power of a family saga. From the Hardcover edition. This splendid novel lives and breathes with all its psychic powers and complex human spirit. South County is carefully observed, lovingly rendered and delicately parsed—a full-throated celebration of the natural world. By the end of the book [readers] may well feel as if they themselves had spent several years living in South County.
And many such readers, I predict, will be reluctant to leave. Rose is a literary rarity—the good and tender-hearted character who is also credible. And Casey has written an affecting story of the way it is—messy, difficult and sometimes radiantly splendid. Casey describes the extreme claustrophobia and menace of small town living well. Casey is so adept at presenting character.
It would be great to see them crewing the Pequod, searching for that ever-elusive whale.
There are many lovely, sharp details surrounding the scenery of this estuary, and characters are complicated and fascinating—especially young Rose. Also in Vintage Contemporaries. Also by John Casey. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Probably the best way to read The Compass Rose does not involve a distracting girlfriend or a reading list as long as your leg with a time limit of about a month.
As always, though, Ursula Le Guin's writing is beautiful, and her ideas are amazing and clever. A touch silly, a touch political or I thought so, anyway: Some of her little phrases or conversations in this book made me grin. For example, from "The Water is Wide": Help me get out.
I like Le Guin best when she's expanding her ideas out into a novel. Le Guin at her finest. And let's be real: Buy this title from Powell's Books. Oct 05, Cheri rated it really liked it Shelves: Short stories are a tough area for me. I want to like them, but often they fall flat for me; this collection is no different. The nice thing is that if one story doesn't touch me, the next one is coming soon.
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So, honestly, it's a 3. These are not generally upbeat stories. There is a lot of dark, near-future stuff, stuff that is, like good dystopian-style stuff, frightening because I can see how it could happen. I wish more people read this kind of writing, to be warned, to be aware Short stories are a tough area for me. I wish more people read this kind of writing, to be warned, to be aware of how today will affect tomorrow. Many of the stories are set in my region, which is, of course, extra fun. I'll probably read more Le Guin collections as the years go by. Nov 09, WarpDrive rated it it was ok Shelves: It just did not work for me.
Very little substance, too much pretension.
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What also killed it for me was the recurrence of forced, mixed-quality, artificial attempts to build atmospheric settings to compensate for the vacuousness of the narrative, resulting in such an exasperatingly boring reading experience as to force me to abandon this book half way through. Sorry - but not for me. I gave it a supplementary star as I could not complete this book - maybe the second part is better, but I just wa It just did not work for me. I gave it a supplementary star as I could not complete this book - maybe the second part is better, but I just was not ready to take the risk to have to suffer another half book of the same stuff.
Jun 20, Dennis Fischman rated it really liked it. Rereading this after many years, I admire the art of Le Guin's writing and the playfulness of her imagination. I found "The Diary of the Rose" especially moving. A young woman psychologist treats a political prisoner and gradually loses her innocence. Read it to decide for yourself what she gains. Other stories are romps, spoofs, parodies, like "Intracom" and "Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time. It's remarkable that one writer can produce all these different stories--and yet it's Le Guin's voice throughout, no mistaking it.
I'm surprised she's not more acclaimed than she already is. Prije par godina sam procitao ovih par Ursulinih zbirki i tada mi je Dvanaest cetvrti vetra bila onako vrh, a ove druge ni blizu nje. No, eto sad sam ponovio i ova zbirka prica mi se jako svidja, i komotno moze stajat rame uz rame sa Dvanaest cetvrti vetra. Mislim, u zbirci nema lose price, nego neke mi jednostavno nisu toliko mocne kao ove koj Prije par godina sam procitao ovih par Ursulinih zbirki i tada mi je Dvanaest cetvrti vetra bila onako vrh, a ove druge ni blizu nje. Mislim, u zbirci nema lose price, nego neke mi jednostavno nisu toliko mocne kao ove koje sam naveo.
Feb 02, Barbara rated it really liked it. Very good stories - some about old women - hey we need more stories about old women.
Compass Rose by John Casey | theranchhands.com: Books
Mar 01, Piers rated it it was amazing. This collection of short stories was assembled a few years after the author's "The Wind's Twelve Quarters", which I remember as being uniformly wonderful, although it's been many years since I've read it. Here there was some unevenness, I won't say of quality, but at least in how much I enjoyed each piece. Nearly every story has a definite Science Fiction or Fantasy bent, which isn't really surprising. What did surprise me was that two of my three favorites "Gwilan's Harp", and "Two Delays on th This collection of short stories was assembled a few years after the author's "The Wind's Twelve Quarters", which I remember as being uniformly wonderful, although it's been many years since I've read it.
My other favorite was the title story, which I found beautiful, sad, and unexpected. Several themes occur multiple times throughout the collection. Several stories are built on the notion of animals having a good deal of intelligence, perhaps equal to although different from that of humans. This is tied up with an exploration of the difficulty of inter-species communication. Other stories examine transformations, by turns macabre and moving. Still more consider the relativity of perception, adaptation to environment, and evolution.
I suppose my biggest criticism of the stories as a group is that some of the "science" on which some stories are based is so wildly implausible as to be distracting examples would probably constitute spoilers, so I'll refrain. I found it necessary to really embrace my suspension of disbelief in order to find enjoyment in those pieces. Still, Le Guin is a wonderful writer, and I'd certainly recommend the collection overall to anyone who's enjoyed her other works. Again, most reviews don't contain a table of contents, so I'll add mine as I re read.
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I had expected to see an illustration of an actual compass rose, which is not in this edition. The early compass-makers were making works of utility and beauty. We haven't completely lost this combination: Really an explanation of the name and theme of the book First Section: And Again, most reviews don't contain a table of contents, so I'll add mine as I re read.
And other extracts from the Journal Of The Association of Therolinguists with an appeal for the establishment of a Society of Phytolinguistics; or at least of Phytoaesthetics. I should say that I'm not so sure that it's a 'fact' that plants don't communicate.
I remember a suggestion from the roundtable discussion at the end of A Glorious Accident: Well, what if sometimes they do? Spanish moss and other epiphytes are not parasitic. They use living trees essentially as scaffolding, to get them up in the air, where they can trap airborne water and nutrients. And they may benefit the trees thereby, by attracting other life to the canopy level. But strictly speaking, the relationship between them is mostly structural.
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And there are many plants that live more or less symbiotically with animals, and not just in matters of pollination, seed dispersion, etc. Some plants depend on insects so heavily that, for example, peonies couldn't bloom without ants to eat the waxy material sealing their buds shut. Maybe plants DO communicate, in subtle ways like providing succulent fruits, copious nectar, ultraviolet 'landing strips' on their flower petals, etc. And then there are, for example, some jellyfish and tubeworms which cultivate nutrient-producing bacteria, algae, etc, in their tissues.
A depiction of a decidedly dystopian Oregon, set in some near-future time. With interspersions from the point of view of Or maybe people just in some sort of suspended animation? The dystopian elements are almost entirely unexplained. Hypernationalism is perhaps credible. There may even be some explanation for the ban on marriage, though it's never really explained. But why no woman doctors? Why limit science to those who can pass background checks? The narrator of the framing story is surprisingly well-informed in history for someone who has never been to any but approved schooling which only permits MBAs and other financial training, really.
I suspect some bootleg educating. A few technical notes: Roughly translated, 'sameness'; it referred to a machine like the English 'mimeograph'--hence the purple fingers, because if you're old enough to remember mimeographs, you'd probably remember that they used purple ink.
Using such machines for underground publications is an old tradition.
Compass Rose : And Other Stories (Electronic book text)
It would be hard to do now, because the machines have been orphaned. But some equivalent technology would probably replace it, in a world with such a limited power supply as proposed. A favorite of many people. What if the laws of the quantum level should begin to apply on the observable level? How would we cope with the loss of certainty and causality?
A man or maybe it's a dog tries to restore causality by physically performing Schrodinger's gedankenexperiment. But why would that work? I had to look up 'Krasnoy', which I vaguely and, it appears, correctly associated with Russia. These two stories are only tangentially related, though they have a common theme, and a common time there's a flood that affects the train tracks in both cases. A man fails to realize that he's been grieving the loss of his mother incrementally since he reached adulthood and established his own life. So he castigates himself for not feeling 'appropriate' grief at the prescribed time.
But since he never recognizes the actual process, he can't really come to a resolution. The consensus seems to be that LeGuin made up the name. Another word to look up. It refers to reincarnation, apparently, except that in this case the subject has not disincarnated, exactly. In mourning his dead wife, he pays little attention to the fact that he's inherited a house he never lived in he visited elderly relatives there as a child. But going there to prepare the place for sale, he is surprised to find he feels he's coming home.
Many of LeGuin's stories remind me of Ashleigh Brilliant's aphorism: It's nonsense, of course. There's no such test, and pretty much by definition there can't be. But the totalitarian measures instituted on the basis on the argument would still be unjustifiable. Who SAYS you can't be free, or happy, just because you're mad? Nobody seems to question this basic assumption. The next but two story deals with this absurdity in more depth.
A recently dead woman explores the 'other rooms' in her two room house