Elena Johansen’s Reviews > The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin > Status Update

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.