Elena Johansen > Recent Status Updates

I'm back, I'm not going to catalog everything I read since I stopped logging books in spring 2022, and I'm giving up on the idea that I can stick to one book at a time, hence the three I just marked "currently reading."

I am still planning to review most books I read, if not every one, but I may not write novel-length reviews as much as I used to. I could stand to be more concise; I'm not being graded on these.

I'm enjoying this, but it's slow going and it's going to be a long project. Time to figure out how to balance this with other reading.

It's not that the book itself is bad or slow, I just haven't had much time to read. Hoping to fix that today.

Got to skip a lot because I've read them before elsewhere, maybe I can actually finish this today!

I'm not digging most of these stories in the first section, with the notable exception of "Diary of the Rose"--of course I latch on to the one with sci-fi elements in the otherwise bland sea of "real world" stories. I don't think Le Guin shines when writing about the mundane.

I'm not going to review every story, but I want to keep my thoughts organized as I read. I'm through the first four, the "Orsinian tales," and I found them all uniformly dour and heavy, and believable as set in a fictional Eastern European country, but mostly because it felt so stereotypical. I don't feel that Orsinia is a different country, but an amalgamation of Western ideas about Eastern Europe at the time.