A couple more quick reviews of books I've read over the holidays.
Drop City by T.C. Boyle. Another recommendation from friends; it's kind of making the rounds in my drumming group. It's the story of a 60s-style commune, with all the counter-cultural trappings such as sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, forced to move operations to the Alaskan wilderness. I admit it, I read it as an exercise in hippie nostalgia, and as such was much entertained. The story is also good, the characters interesting and worth getting to know, and the writing entertaining. My only caveat is the occasional polysyllabicisms Boyle commits while narrating from the point-of-view of characters that would never use such words.
The Eye of the Heron by Ursula LeGuin. LeGuin is often one of my holiday pleasure-reading guilty pleasures. That is not to say that she isn't a very literary science fiction/fantasy writers, because she is. She also deals in interesting ways with real-world political and religious themes, many of which I've been interested in for a long time, such as anarchism (The Dispossessed), Jungian psychology (The Earthsea Tetralogy), Taoism (her translation of the Tao Te Ching) and Gandhian non-violence (The Eye of the Heron). In this short novel, LeGuin creates a world originally used as a penal colony and then later becomes the exile home of nonviolent activists. The plot centers on the inevitable clash between the world-views and ideologies of these two very different cultures. The story ends hopefully yet tentatively, showing that the desire for freedom is a great aspiration, but one with a cost.
Posted by jeb at January 23, 2005 10:10 PM | TrackBack