schemingreader

People. You all recommend Ursula LeGuin books all the time, but no one warned me that The Lathe of Heaven is so much catchier, so much more absorbing, than the others. Or maybe it was where my head was...I picked up the book in the middle of the night and read it in about an hour, the whole thing, cover to cover. I think I read it from about 1AM to 2AM. I admit, I'm a scarily quick decoder, but I do blame the book a little. I was just completely absorbed into the central problems of the book.

I think the three pieces that captured my attention the most were: the issue of Haber, the therapist's, good intentions, the problem of how the unconscious actually works, and what makes each person unique. Heather Lalache is the person who changes the most in each reality--that was disturbing to me, actually, because even though some scenes were written from her perspective, the two male leads didn't change much.

I think LeGuin was trying to make the point that Heather's racial identity as a mixed-race, black woman was essential to her personality and part of what George Orr loves in her. But even when she's grey and a little more timid, he still loves her. Does he love her for everything she is? He loves her when she's a lawyer and when she's a legal secretary--and we have to imagine what in each reality has changed that she doesn't get to be a lawyer in all realities. Does that mean in some realities that her mother's relatives haven't readopted her into the family? Have they all died in some versions of reality, in the Plague? Or are some realities more sexist than others? It seems that in the last version of reality she still has her husband's last name, as a widow, and in other versions she didn't keep it. Is this a more sexist reality? Is she tougher in that world?

Why do you think this book was more absorbing? It felt so tightly written, more in the genre space to me. Le Guin fans, do you agree?