No Time to Spare

No Time to Spare
Ursula K. Le Guin
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, December 5, 2017
241 pages
Kindle edition $9.99, Amazon paperback $8.99

I have long been familiar with Ursula Le Guin. I read her Earthsea Trilogy (when it was still only a trilogy) during my year in exile in Laredo, Texas, 1977-78. I was interested to learn, then, that she maintained a blog from roughly 2010 to 2014. I’m sorry that I wasn’t aware of it when it was live, but I was happy that some of the entries were compiled in this volume.

I initially thought that the title meant that there is too much work to be done, so there is no time to spare, but early in the book Le Guin says that there is no time to spare because of her advanced age.

Le Guin covers the waterfront in this compilation. She writes about her rustic house in Oregon. She writes about her correspondences from fans, about feminism, politics, and society, and about attending concerts. In several entries she tells us about her feisty cat, Pard. When she feels strongly about something she does not mince words. We know where she stands.

I read No Time to Spare on my iPhone 8. I had a Kindle app on my old iPhone 5s, but the screen was simply too small to be practical for that purpose. The iPhone 8 screen is large enough to make a book readable. I wouldn’t recommend War and Peace, but a short book of essays like this one makes for enjoyable reading wherever I might be.