#it just impresses me how well this author deals with loneliness... granted; a perfect topic for sci-fi

[child-of-hurin]

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I’ve read/listened to a bunch of Ursula Le Guin books this year and it always gets me how (my impression) she will be writing something kinda bleak and then, suddenly, there are little bursts, or big explosions, of interpersonal feeling, and these moments completely disarm both the characters and ME, THE READER. 

I think everything I read of hers so far had this on one measure or another, but I’m specifically thinking of The Word for World is Forest, a violent, merciless, bleak little book about colonialism which hurt me page after page, word after word, but the passage that made me actually tear up was when the main character went into his dead alien friend’s war-beaten, abandoned office to get a chair, and

Before he left the silent room he leaned down and laid his cheek on the scarred, raw wood of the desk, where [his friends] had always sat when he worked with [him] or alone...