I've just given up on my second attempt (in over 20 years) to read 'Always Coming Home' by Ursula Le Guin (1985). It is the title that transfixes me. I also like the look of the book, its shape, its size, its weight, the feel of the paper, the type of font used, the illustrations and charts. But I find it unreadable. It consists of over 500 pages of imaginative detail but I can't relate to it.
The content seems so pointless and empty. I find myself thinking, 'Had the writer nothing better to do with the time and energy?'
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This novel is about a cultural group of humans—the Kesh—who "might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California." (p. i) Part novel, part textbook, part anthropologist's record, Always Coming Home explains the life and culture of the Kesh people. The bulk of the book is a mixture of Kesh cultural lore (including poetry, prose of various kinds, mythos, rituals, and recipes), essays on Kesh culture, and the musings of the narrator, "Pandora".
It is set in a time so post-apocalyptic that no cultural source can remember the apocalypse, though a few folk tales refer to our time. The only signs of our civilisation that have lasted into their time are artifacts such as styrofoam and a self-manufacturing, self-maintaining, solar-system-wide computer network. They use such inventions of civilization as writing, steel, guns, electricity, trains, and the aforementioned computer network.
I just didn't care about the information I was being presented with. I couldn't get in to the spirit of the book.
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