All I've been reading lately has been student assignments. I want to be reading The Left Hand of Darkness, which I found at a used bookstore and am looking at for a course I'm helping a professor prep. A course I should be helping my professor prep. I would be helping if I weren't so buried. (I would much rather be prepping it!!!!!)
If you can't tell, I'm pretty down about this class taking over my life so unexpectedly, which is weird, since I usually set my expectations so low that anything other than a disaster seems rather pleasant. My expectations about the teaching resources that would be provided for me for this class were set too high. The class is a huge, time-consuming disaster for me. See what happens when you don't set your expectations low enough! :)
The essay about science fiction in the introduction of my copy of The Left Hand of Darkness was so elegant and clear and simple and LeGuin that it was excellent. It was especially stunning after the essays I've been grading lately. Who knows? Some day, one of my students could be writing as beautifully as LeGuin. I wish I could help them all improve without killing myself in the process, but that is another example of an expectation that will probably only hurt me.
This too shall pass. There will always be books to look forward to. So for now, onward.
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I need to read more Le Guin- I came across "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" in the Ethics textbook I'm using, and read it aloud to my class the other day, and it left me wanting to read more. I *think* they enjoyed it... at the least, it definitely started some good discussion.
ReplyDeleteVictory! Yeah, you'd like the essay I'm talking about here. It kind of fits. It's funny that so many sci-fi readers avoid Le Guin because they think she's too literary, whatever that means. She gets respect from the general literary community because she is an excellent writer. She has written outside sci-fi, and her tiny little writing book *Steering the Craft* is used in some BFA and MFA programs. It's good stuff.
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