[pkkim]

I want to plug one of her lesser known books, Always Coming Home. It's set among a tribe of people living in the Bay Area way, way after some apocalypse has erased the memory of our civilization. Much of the book is reports from an anthropologist studying the people.

I think a lot of her books are about how many different ways of life and types of society and culture are possible, and this book is one of her best at bringing you in to another culture.

[giraffe_lady]

I love that book too, maybe my favorite by her, but have found it to be a polarizing recommendation. It's a very unusual format (the novel is interspersed with creation myths, plays, songs, recipes, etc of the people of the setting) and some people just immediately dislike it.

I also think in some important ways it is not as narratively strong as her best works, a necessary tradeoff for what it does accomplish. It's very interesting to consider her being raised by an anthropologist, and her exceptional childhood exposure to Ishi, whom her father had known and her mother and brother separately wrote books about.

A thread running through all of her books is a deep human interest in the ways of peoples, and how their stories about themselves shape who they are and their relationship to a changing world. Always Coming Home is the book of her that is most, almost exclusively, focused on these concerns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi_in_Two_Worlds

[sunshowers]

I love Always Coming Home so much. It's so rich and creative.

For a shorter story (~50 pages), I'd highly recommend Paradises Lost by her. Many people have written stories about generation ships, but this one is absolutely stunning and truly marvelous.

[incanus77]

A friend recommended this, and I just recently finished it — my first reading of Le Guin. As a student of history and someone interested in how we record it, it was really something for me. I want to read it again already.

[creer]

It's very atypical for her - and I think she recognized that. Yes, an ambitious work of anthropology through fiction, illustrating how "tribal" works?

[m3talsmith]

I have a hard copy of this one. Definitely a favorite!

[lproven]

I love ACH.

Some 30 years after I read it, I still use "heya" as my default greeting.