For once this wasn’t a book off my own shelf, but rather one passed to me to read. Being my first Ursula Le Guin, I didn’t have any expectations for it, which I think benefitted my read as Always Coming Home is very unusual in her catalogue of works.
I’ll start by explaining that the entire book is essentially worldbuilding. Short stories, documents, poems and plays are all put together to create a sense of a futuristic society seen through a retrospective perspective. The imagination and detail put into this world is impressive, to say the least, giving a thorough and in-depth insight into the valley and its people. There always seems to be more to learn, with details offhandedly mentioned that are never elaborated on as they’re treated as common knowledge. The whole world seems fantastical and exists somewhere between very advanced and yet very set in the past. For anyone who enjoys stories told through unconventional means, this is worth a read!
The mix of section lengths were good for me as someone who reads moslty on my commute and on lunch breaks, with the occasional afternoon to do big reads. It is a chunky book and can be extremely dense at times, but the mix of formats offered a lot of relief from the heavier prose. Mixed in with maps, illustrations, and the visual style of each page, the book is in fact much lighter than it initially appears.
For me I struggled a little with it as the longest running narrative through the book was not one I was interested in, and a chunk at the back of the book explains lots of integral world details and has the glossary that I would have preferred either at the start of the book or peppered through to help understand the world as a whole during the read. I had a significant preference for the poetry and plays within the book than I did for the prose, so I often found myself wishing there were more of those than the stories themselves.
Perhaps I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book as anyone’s first Ursula Le Guin, as she is famous for her other works, but I would recommend it to anyone who loves worldbuilding and multi-format literature. For me, not one I was particularly invested in picking up again.
a place of words 