No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

(excerpt), with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler
Ursula K. Le Guin on the absurdity of denying your age: "If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub."
On cultural perceptions of fantasy: "The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?"
On breakfast: "Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime."
Ursula K. Le Guin has taken readers to imaginary worlds for decades. Now she’s in the last great frontier of life, old age, and exploring new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice — sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical — shines. No Time to Spare collects the best of Ursula’s online writing, presenting perfectly crystallized dispatches on what matters to her now, her concerns with this world, and her unceasing wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”
Le Guin’s mindful empathy for every kind of living and non-living thing makes her a role model for the rest of us who ever tried to walk a mile in another kind of shoe… With her profound skepticism of the merits of capitalism, her à la carte Eastern spirituality, and her willingness to be disliked, she could certainly be a strong contender for Mayor of Portland. — Megan Volpert, PopMatters
Her takeaway (‘There are many bad books. There are no bad genres.’) exemplifies her keen ability to boil down complex issues to their essence, even as she argues with nuance and grace. — Jason Heller, NPR.org
In 2010, at the age of 81, the acclaimed novelist Ursula K. Le Guin started a blog. Blogs never seemed a likely destination for the writer, who by then had a long career in 20th-century traditional publishing behind her. But Le Guin’s new book, No Time To Spare, which harvests a representative sample of her blog posts, feels like the surprising and satisfying culmination to a career in other literary forms. — Robert Minto, The New Republic
Fantasy and SF author Le Guin (The Lost and the Found) mines her blog in these short, punchy, and canny meditations on aging, literature, and cats. Prompted by an alumni survey from her alma mater, Radcliffe, that asks how she occupies her spare time, she takes issue with the idea that any time occupied by living — whether that means reading, writing, cooking, eating, cleaning, etc. — can be considered spare. Moreover, with her 81st birthday fast approaching, Le Guin declares, "I have no time to spare." — Publishers Weekly
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