Ursula K. Le Guin is one of those writers everyone agrees you should read, and almost nobody agrees where you should start. That's because she wrote so many different kinds of book: the Earthsea fantasy novels, the Hainish science fiction, fables, poetry, essays, and at least one book that's barely a novel at all. She won the Hugo and Nebula awards multiple times, received the PEN/Malamud Award for her short fiction, and was given the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014.
Here's a practical way in, depending on what kind of reader you are.
If you want a sampler: start with the stories
The Wind's Twelve Quarters is our suggested starting point if you want a sample of Le Guin's range. It collects seventeen stories from the first decade of her career, and Le Guin wrote a short note before each one explaining where it came from.
Two of them are essential. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a short story about a perfect city and the one condition of its happiness, and it has been argued over in philosophy classrooms for fifty years. It won the Hugo Award. "The Day Before the Revolution" won the Nebula and follows Odo, the aging revolutionary whose ideas shape The Dispossessed, through her last afternoon.
You'll also find early glimpses of Earthsea and the Hainish worlds, so if one of those stories grabs you, you know which novels to read next. See the book.
If you want something light and funny: Changing Planes
Changing Planes starts from a joke. The boredom and misery of a delayed flight, it turns out, lets you slip sideways into other planes of existence. What follows is a set of travel reports from societies Le Guin invented to think with: a people who never sleep, an island where everyone is slowly turning into birds, a world where everyone is royalty and nobody is happy about it.
It's her gentlest, most playful book, and every piece is doing real thinking under the comedy. It's the one to hand someone who doesn't think they like science fiction. See the book.
If you want her most ambitious book: Always Coming Home
Always Coming Home is Le Guin's attempt to describe, in full, a people who might live in Northern California long after our civilization is gone. It isn't told like a normal novel. It reads like an archaeologist's collection of everything recovered from a culture: poems, recipes, songs, maps, plays, and one woman's life story running through the middle.
That life story is told by a woman called Stone Telling. She leaves her home valley to live among her father's people, a militarized society to the north, and the contrast between the two cultures carries the whole book. For a first encounter with Le Guin, we suggest trying a story collection before this more formally unusual work. See the book.
The famous novels
Most readers eventually find their way to the books Le Guin is best known for, and all four are on the shelf:
- A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), the first Earthsea novel, about a boy with a gift for magic and the shadow he releases into the world. See the book.
- The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), a Hugo and Nebula winner about an envoy on a frozen planet whose people have no fixed sex.
- The Lathe of Heaven (1971), about a man whose dreams rewrite reality and the psychiatrist who decides to use them. See the book.
- The Dispossessed (1974), also a Hugo and Nebula winner, about a physicist from an anarchist moon visiting its capitalist twin planet. The 50th anniversary edition has a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler. See the book.
If you read The Wind's Twelve Quarters first, you'll arrive at all of them already knowing the worlds they come from.
Our suggested order
- The Wind's Twelve Quarters, to find out which of her worlds you like best
- Changing Planes, for pure pleasure
- Whichever famous novel matches the story that stuck with you
- Always Coming Home, once you're ready for the deep end
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