\nFrom the back cover:\n<\/p>\n
\nIt was Sita Dulip who discovered, whilst stuck in an airport, unable to get anywhere, how to change planes – literally. By a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere – be anywhere – because she was already between planes… and on the way back from her sister’s wedding she missed her plane in Chicago and found herself in Choom.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nChanging Planes<\/i> is a (smallish) collection of brief glimpses of these different planes. Nothing much happens in these stories, but they are still very lively and don’t feel like mere descriptions. They are like memories of trips you yourself might have taken, described more eloquently than you could have done. When we describe a foreign country, we do not necessarily tell of particular events, but of the landscape, the people, their habits, their history. And this is what Le Guin does as well. It’s sort of like Gulliver’s Travels<\/i> but with less action and less absurd worlds – and far more ideas per page.\n<\/p>\n
\nAs always in Le Guin’s books, the worlds are close enough to ours to give us something to recognise and respond to, but alien enough to remain interesting. Here, for example, is a plane where the people give up speech as they grow up, and only children talk. A plane where people migrate north and south with the seasons, like birds, and each life lasts only three (long) seasons. There is a plane where almost everyone is of royal blood, and where the tabloids are full of juicy stories about the few commoners that are left.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe book has that unmistakable Le Guin tone, quietly charming, sophisticated, humourous and somehow wistful. It is like her eyes see a more beautiful world than most of us do. (She is also a bit of a romantic – her nice worlds tend to be pastoral anarchies, and all unpleasantness stems from capitalism and the desire for progress.)\n<\/p>\n
\nAltogether a lovely book.\n<\/p>\n
\nAmazon UK<\/a>, Amazon US<\/a>.\n<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the back cover: It was Sita Dulip who discovered, whilst stuck in an airport, unable to get anywhere, how to change planes – literally. By a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere – be anywhere – because she was already between planes… […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}