Ursula K. Le Guin inspires moody musings with pieces from the late author's blog

The KUOW Book Club is reading "No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters" by Ursula K. Le Guin this month. I'm your reading guide Katie Campbell. Let's get into a couple of items from the first half of the book.

T

his time of year is perfect for moodily reflecting on life and musing about things like aging and utopia and cats.

I picked the blog post Le Guin titled "Catching Up, Ha Ha" because it reminded me of my own many failed attempts to keep a journal or a blog as a kid. How many of my entries consisted of me apologizing to my journal for not writing lately? How many crushes or new hobbies on one page were spurned on the next after a few months? Too many to count.

RELATED: Subscribe to the KUOW Book Club newsletter here

Le Guin had other things on her mind as she caught up with her blog and its readers: her age.

She wrote this blog on the eve of her 85th birthday. I read it on the day of my 33rd, slightly melancholy after a perfect birthday weekend.

Le Guin seemed a bit melancholy, too, starting off on a humorous note as she joked about having been "rude to amazondotcom" before reflecting on how she and her husband, Charles, had become limited in their old age. Suddenly, they weren't driving anymore. Walking was harder. Grocery trips were weekly, like when they were kids, and dependent on another person taking a trip to the store.

Oh, Ursula. The Land of Youth is rather weird, too. The Land of Diminishing Youth all the more so. But you're right — at least I can pop out to the store when the only remedy for the weirdness is a pint of ice cream or a long drive out to where no one knows me.

The second piece I chose from the first half of this collection was "Utopiyin, Utopiyang," a much more writerly essay on craft and utopia versus dystopia in literate and life.

RELATED: KUOW Book Club's November pick is pulled from the blog of PNW great Ursula K. Le Guin

I shouted out to my partner, Drew, in joyful surprise when Le Guin referenced Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" on page 86.

"I love that!" I said.

"I love that you love that," said Drew, to whom I gifted a copy of "We" found at the bottom of a stack of books at BLMF Literary Saloon in Pike Place Market. (Actually, the wonderful owner of BLMF, J.B. Johnson, found it for me. I asked whether he happened to have a copy, and as though there was an arrow pointing directly to it, he walked right over to sci-fi and plucked it from the bottom of a stack that was behind another stack. It was incredible. But I digress.)

Le Guin referenced "We" as an example of utopia/dystopia that is an "enclave of maximum control surrounded by a wilderness."

Le Guin was reflecting not only on her own work and portrayals of utopia/dystopia, but also on the world around her. In another passage from this essay on page 87, she seems to turn her critique toward the world off the page; she wrote this piece in April 2015.

Yang perceives yin only as negative, inferior, bad, and yang has always been given the last word. But there is no last word.

At present we seem only to write dystopias. Perhaps in order to be able to write a utopia we need to think yinly. I tried to write one in "Always Coming Home." Did I succeed?

Is a yin utopia a contradiction in terms, since all the familiar utopias rely on control to make them work, and yin does not control? Yet it is a great power. How does it work?

I can only guess. My guess is that the kind of thinking we are, at last, beginning to do about how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival is a shift from yang to yin, and so involves an acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the Earth.

I wonder why this was on Le Guin's mind at the time — utopia and dystopia and impermanence and imperfection. It would be easy to connect the latter bit to her previous thoughts on aging, but I think there was more to it than that.

In April 2015, as she was writing this piece, I was a month away from graduating from the University of Florida. I think I would've liked Le Guin's blog then, though I wasn't reading for leisure much at the time. I could've used her words about patience with uncertainty as I prepared to head out into the world, the other side of the country to my first real job. But they're helpful now, too, a reminder that as I embark on another year in this existence, impermanence and imperfection and the makeshift are to be expected.

RELATED: Feminine rage takes center stage in the conclusion of Seattle mystery 'Elita'

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Spoiler alert: Those of you who like to get a head start on what we're reading will be happy to hear I have locked in our December read — no plot twists in the schedule this time, I promise.

Next month, we'll be reading "Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler" by Susana M. Morris. It's a beautiful biography of Butler that not only explores her work but also the key historical and social moments that shaped it — and the literary styles Butler herself inspired. 

Morris considers Butler's life and legacy through the real movements that influenced her imaginative writing, including the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women's liberation, LGBTQ rights, and more. Throughout her life, informed by these movements, Butler envisioned better futures for humanity, centering Black women as pillars of strength and wisdom. Whether they were shape-shifting immortals or young vampires, Butler's characters fought the status quo, challenging gender norms and demanding better from the world around them.

But what drove her? What made Butler attuned to the moment in ways other writers were not? In "Positive Obsession," Morris will show us that Butler felt she simply had to write.