Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    No Time to Spare
    No Time to Spare
    No Time to Spare
    Audiobook6 hours

    No Time to Spare

    Written by Ursula K. Le Guin

    Narrated by Barbara Caruso

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, and with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler, a collection of thoughts-always adroit, often acerbic-on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation. Ursula K. Le Guin has taken readers to imaginary worlds for decades. Now she's in the last great frontier of life, old age, and exploring new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice-sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical-shines. No Time to Spare collects the best of Ursula's blog, presenting perfectly crystallized dispatches on what matters to her now, her concerns with this world, and her wonder at it. On the absurdity of denying your age, she says, "If I'm ninety and believe I'm forty-five, I'm headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub." On cultural perceptions of fantasy: "The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is 'escapism' an accusation of?" On her new cat: "He still won't sit on a lap.I don't know if he ever will. He just doesn't accept the lap hypothesis." On breakfast: "Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime." And on all that is unknown, all that we discover as we muddle through life: "How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us."

    Editor's Note

    Award winning…

    Acclaimed writer Ursula K. Le Guin posthumously won the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Related Work for this collection. Reading her essays feels like having an intimate chat with the sharp, witty science fiction master.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJan 15, 2018
    ISBN9781501959851
    No Time to Spare
    Author

    Ursula K. Le Guin

    URSULA K. LE GUIN was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929, and passed away in Portland, Oregon, in 2018. She published over sixty books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, children’s literature, and translation. She was the recipient of a National Book Award, six Hugo and five Nebula awards, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  

    More audiobooks from Ursula K. Le Guin

    Related to No Time to Spare

    Related audiobooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin

      Jan 29, 2018

      The revolutionary science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin, who passed away January 22, understood something important about ideal worlds and societies: Utopia is not perfection. Utopia is process. It is reflection and adjustment, learning and growth

      7 min read

    • Article

      Margaret Atwood: ‘It Would Be Fun To Talk To Simone De Beauvoir’

      Mar 11, 2023

      Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testam

      4 min read

    • Article

      I Think This Is Real

      Jun 13, 2022

      Have you ever talked about a movie or a book you’re interested in, only to have your social media accounts serve up ads for those very items, almost as if they were listening? Now imagine the same social media accounts could be harnessed by NSA data

      7 min read

    • Article

      What I Deserve

      Apr 13, 2022

      IN THE past two years I have opened a bookstore while keeping my day job; finished a novel draft and written another novel draft; grieved the death of a friend, and another friend; started and stopped multiple vitamin regimens; watched my mother slip

      8 min read

    • Article

      Seven Books I’ll Never Read

      Aug 7, 2018

      Seven Books I’ll Never Read
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Surreally Diverse World Of 'Catherine House'

      Sep 26, 2020

      This week, Code Switch is talking about our favorite pandemic reads. Today's conversation is with author Elisabeth Thomas, about her fictional cult-like college, set deep in the woods of Pennsylvania.

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Rachel Yoder

      Dec 10, 2020

      But then, March. Then, my child’s kindergarten teacher says to me, “I don’t know if we’re ever coming back.” And we didn’t. We never went back. I kept reading, but it got weirder, or maybe I did. The post A Year in Reading: Rachel Yoder appeared fir

      3 min read

    • Article

      Nowhere Man

      Jun 5, 2022

      Nowhere Man
      4 min read

    • Article

      THE WD INTERVIEW Dani Shapiro

      Oct 30, 2019

      THE WD INTERVIEW Dani Shapiro
      11 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Lynn Steger Strong

      Dec 2, 2020

      Maybe because of how much I miss human interaction, maybe because I’ve lost my faith in so much else: I believe in books, at least the ones that feel like primal screams, in ways I never have before. The post A Year in Reading: Lynn Steger Strong app

      4 min read

    • Article

      Wild Things

      Jun 23, 2023

      Wild Things
      3 min read

    • Article

      Mallory Ortberg On The Remixed Fairy Tales Of Her New Book 'The Merry Spinster'

      Mar 14, 2018

      Call Cinderella Paul. Mallory Ortberg, co-founder of the dearly departed feminist website The Toast, Slate's "Dear Prudence," and the author of "Children's Stories Made Horrific" and "Texts from Jane Eyre," turns beloved fairy tales on their heads in

      5 min read

    • Article

      Sabrina Orah Mark Finds Truth in Fairy Tales

      Mar 15, 2023

      "The essay is a search for knowing, while always being in a realm of unknowing." The post Sabrina Orah Mark Finds Truth in Fairy Tales appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for No Time to Spare

    4/5

    251 ratings37 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      short pieces, several interesting. Quick read.
    • 4/5
      This is one I read some time ago and cannot recall enough about to review. It's hard to fault Le Guin, though.
    • 5/5
      No surprise at all that it would be Ursula K. Le Guin that would pull me out of a crappy headspace. I am grateful for this little collection that charmed me during the ongoing hours of isolation.
    • 4/5
      I loved the beginning half of this book. I'm a fan of Mrs Le Guin and enjoyed hearing her thoughts. one half was plenty though, and the second half seemed more trivial somehow.
      I did not enjoy the bits about her cat.
    • 4/5
      Most of these essays were witty and informative. I enjoyed those about her cat the best. I also loved the fact that she spoke about aging in practical terms, and with mostly joy.
    • 4/5
      In turns poetic, cantankerous, thoughtful, funny, Le Guin tears through what she wishes to discuss with short bursts of energy. Often it feels for the reader like the staccato drumming of rain on a tin roof. Unrelenting, until the storm itself passes. Her essays can be critical and uncompromising, but under all of that is thoughtfulness, and knowledge harvested from a long life well lived.
    • 5/5
      Selected blog posts. Amusing and sharp ideas from a very good writer at the end of her life.
    • 5/5
      I had no idea going into this book what it might look like. It turns out to be a book of adapted blog posts, and a stirring and wonderful book at that. I love how it is organized, with Le Guin's uncompromising voice telling us what she thinks of the world leavened by stories about her darling cat. The cat stories almost universally made me laugh. Pard is quite the adventurer, and Le Guin could spin a story out of a piece of paper dropping to earth. Anyway, one of my favorite things about this book is that Le Guin is old when she wrote it and she's extremely honest about how much being old sucks. She doesn't hide her gradual decline, or her pain, or try to pretend to be anywhere other than where she is -- an elderly woman, sharp minded, gradually losing the battle of physical age, and looking, unflinching, at her mortality. We may all be so brave.
    • 5/5
      Previous to this book I knew of Ursula K. Le Guin, but had never read her work; she's primarily known for her science fiction writing and I'm known for not liking science fiction.  But I'd read something about her somewhere that left me with the impression that she had an interesting voice outside her known genre, and I'd heard great things about this collection of essays, so I bought it a couple of years ago, and it's sat on my TBR ever since.Recent events however, have left me ping-ponging back and forth between light reads and chewier reads in an effort not to dwell on all the things that are outside my control at the moment.  One of those things outside my control at the moment is my attention span, or the lack thereof, so I thought this a perfect time to pull this one off the shelf (which was within reach, thankfully).I enjoyed this book, with a few blips along the way, from start to finish.  Le Guin was a very talented writer with a timeless voice, and even when I didn't agree with her, I enjoyed reading what she had to say.  Of course, the essays about her cat Pard were my favourites, but those about ageing put things into a perspective I'd never seen better articulated, and I wanted to go back in time and hug her for her essay on belief vs. thought.I'm still unlikely to ever read her fiction, but there's at least one more collection of essays I'd love to get my hands on, if only to visit with this wonderful author and her mind one more time.
    • 4/5
      Ursula K. Le Guin in her latter days kept a blog and this book collects a sample of her posts. She writes about her cat, about joy, about the challenges of aging, about whatever comes to mind. These essays, for that is what they are, are personal essays and filled with Le Guin's sharp insights, sense of humor (more than one had me laughing out loud) and frankness. I plan on reading through her blog archives, which are still on line,
    • 5/5
      She was brilliant, and her words were nothing short of sparkling, even in the utterance of the driest sarcasm. I especially enjoyed the passages about aging, which were full of honesty and demanded respect and acknowledgment. Just perfect.
    • 4/5
      Essay/blog post collection that reads with great voice and character that made me miss Ursula Le Guin all the more
    • 5/5
      I can only join the chorus of other Goodreaders who loved this. Please skip Karen Joy Fowler's precious, pretentious introduction, ("tongue-gapedly"? Seriously?) and go straight to the first sentence, where she landed me instantly: "I have been inspired by Jose Saramago's extraordinary blogs..." Any friend of Saramago's is a friend of mine. This is LeGuin's foray into blog posts - essays for the modern era. Some rambling, some polished, some feel like the writer simply thinking through her fingers, and every one of them carrying some incisive, wry, clear-eyed, thoughtful idea or question. On old age: "The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time... I still don't know what spare time is because all my time is occupied... it's occupied by living.... None of this is spare time. I can't spare it... I am going to be eighty one next week. I have no time to spare." On her cat Pard (if you are a cat lover, you will love these pieces too - if not, you probably won't): "He fixated on me to begin with...though he's gaining more independence, which is good - if I wanted to be the center of the universe I'd have a dog." She can be scathing: "A question from New Bookends: "Where is the great Americannovel by a woman?"... there's something coy and coercive about the question itself that made me want to charge into the bullring, head down and horns forward...Where is the great American novel by anybody? And I'd answer that: "Who cares?" Which is footnoted by the wonderful aside of Peruvian bullfighters training on cows: "After las vacas bravas, the bulls were easy. An angry bull goes for the red flag; an angry cow goes for the matador." She is feminist, she is contrarian (arguing strongly against the idea that childhood innocence is pure, perfect and a tragedy to lose, and in favor of growth, learning, development and hopefully wisdom... an approach with which Philip Pullman would surely agree). In almost every essay, I felt the wish to write to her, to ask her more, to tell her a story of my own (I've got a snake story not as good as "First Contact," but I think she'd have liked it). The world is a richer place for LeGuin's imagination, humaneness and compassion. And a poorer place without her in it.
    • 4/5
      a collection of blog posts. but in her hands even a blog post is wonderful reading.
    • 4/5
      This is a very nice compendium of blog posts and commentary by Le Guin. The only reason I didn't give it five stars is that several of the pieces are about her cat, and I'm not a cat person :)
    • 4/5
      A collection of short essays -- originally blog posts -- from the late, great Ursula Le Guin. These cover a wide variety of topics: aging, writing, feminism, the state of the world, the antics of her cat, how to eat a soft-boiled egg. Some are serious, some slightly playful, a few just a little bit curmudgeonly, but, unsurprisingly, they're always thoughtful and well-written.
    • 3/5
      This is my first Le Guin book. It is an appeasing and intriguing piece of non-fiction that has short, sometimes anecdotal, pieces about the nature of things, personal observations, and explorations. I found it to be well thought out and written with poise and tacit style.

      Overall, a good read.

      3.5
    • 5/5
      Although an started her blog later in life it provides enjoyable insights into her life. The stories of her life with her cat were fun although I am far from a cat person. Hearing her expound on her fascination with words was fun.
    • 4/5
      I don't read much sci-fi or fantasy, so LeGuin has never been on my favorites list. But this collection of essays on various subjects (from the author's blog) really hit a lot of my sweet spots. What a mind...I'll bet she was usually the smartest person in the room, but never flaunted it. She covers things like the truth about getting old (don't say "it's not for sissies" and stop telling people they're only as young as they feel); the uselessness of swear words that appear five times in one sentence; the inanity of surveys, even those conjured up at Harvard; the narrative gift; and best of all--"The Annals of Pard". Once in a while I found myself disagreeing with her, but she was smarter than I am, so I'm OK with that. I don't mean I grant that she's probably right and I'm wrong, just that I'm fine with an intelligent person holding an opinion I don't share. Once or twice I found I couldn't quite follow her reasoning, and because she was smarter than I am, I think she may have left out a logical step or two that was obvious to her, but not to me. Wish I could sit down and talk to her about those bits.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely loved these short essays and blog posts, which at multiple points had me laughing out loud and also drew the tears a time or two as well. From cats to anger to music to aging ... I would happily read Ursula Le Guin's musings on just about anything.
    • 4/5
      Ursula K. Le Guin, inspired by a blog written by an aging, Jose Saramago, began her own blog in 2010. This is a collection of the best of those essays. Musings, about old age, the state of the union, her cats, literature and various other observations, expressed with sharp intelligence and wit. I have to admit, I am a bit under-read in the Le Guin canon but I hope to catch up with this immensely talented American author. LeGuin does not narrate the audio, but the woman that performs, captures her tone perfectly.
    • 4/5
      This is a collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, who was one of our great American writers, and great science fiction and fantasy writers. Her many awards include being named a Grand Master in 2003, by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

      The essays were written as blog posts for the Book View Cafe blog, and range over a wide variety of subjects, including fan letters from children, the differences among fact, myth, and lies especially when talking to children, eating an egg, her cat Pard, both when she first adopted him, and as he matured and become a real and important personality in her home.

      She says very little directly about politics, but the basic outline of her views is clear, as are her views on eating an egg, or finding her way in places where the streets are twisty and untrustworthy. She talks about the somewhat uncomfortable experience of having to hire a secretary, when her career had reached the point where she unavoidably needed help managing her correspondence.

      She doesn't talk much about her writing, here, but this is a fascinating look inside the mind of a wonderful writer. Throughout these essays, she's thoughtful, insightful, funny and kind.

      Very much recommended.

      I bought this audiobook.
    • 4/5
      This is not a collection of essays but rather a collection of posts from Le Guin's blog, and as such, they lack the sense of polish or significance that an essay might impart. But they do showcase the precision of language that makes Le Guin such a satisfying writer, and there are several gems in here. As in her other nonfiction, Le Guin seems to be at her most insightful when discussing literature and women. One of my favorite selections, for instance, combined the two in an examination of the yin and yang of utopian/dystopian fiction. I also greatly appreciated her insights into Homer. Toward the end, the writing becomes more poetic, introspective, and--as I was reading this in honor of Le Guin's life and her impact on me as a reader--bittersweet. One essay on soft-boiled eggs almost brought me to tears. An uneven collection, but certainly a worthwhile one.
    • 5/5
      How much I already miss Ursula Le Guin. Her fantasy and sci-fi novels explore what it means to be a human, to be gendered, to live with a natural world instead of against it. This collection of essays from her blog are more personal--and leave me with the illusion that I knew her or at least the wish that she had been my neighbor. Here we watch the natural world together. Here I listen to her thoughts on politics and science vs belief and find myself nodding.

      Whether you are already an avid reader of Le Guin or if you are not a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, this collection is thogh-provoking, full of heart and joy, and a joy to read.
    • 4/5
      Several of the essays at the beginning were so on point and provocative about life as an older woman that they made my almost 70yo self nod and ponder. They more than offset other essays later in the volume that don’t speak to me at all later. Love her essays about their cat Pard. And, of course, whether the topic is of interest or not, everything is impeccably written.
    • 4/5
      A delightful collection of blog posts on a variety of subjects, large and small, handled with Le Guin's characteristic grace and wisdom.
    • 3/5
      Le Guin in her eighties, as evidenced by the blog entries that make up this collection, was still smarter than nineteen out of twenty pundits, and pithier than ninety-nine out of a hundred. Having decades of practice in truth-telling both in nonfiction and fiction, she arrived at old age's let-those-who-are-troubled-be-damned candor better prepared than the average grandparent to rant effectively and be listened to. The pieces here are not always weighty--there's quite a lot about her cat--but they are refreshing. Some are about art, some about politics, some about the confusion of thought surrounding things of fact and things of faith. And, of course, some are just musings about whatever was on her mind when it was time to write another entry. There is a charming chapter about Delores Pander, whom Le Guin hired to answer her mail for many years; she was the wife of Henk Pander, a fine painter here in Portland. The book is full of all kinds of surprises, and feels intimate in a way that's a bit sad so soon after Le Guin's death in January 2018.
    • 5/5
      I love spending time with Ursula K. Le Guin's writing and ideas. This book is full of short pieces, blog posts, about her thoughts and the incidents in the last few years of her life. Her refusal to accept what passes for truths in American so-called ideology can be refreshing and/or disturbing. Just approaching 70 I too feel I have no spare time.
    • 4/5
      Just a matter of days after acquiring Ursula K. Le Guin's “No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters,” I saw that the author had died. She died on Jan. 22 at the age of 88. Truly she didn't have time to spare.The author of more than a score of novels, mostly science fiction, and several books of poetry, Le Guin turned to blogging when she reached her 80s. It was a way to stay in the writing game, but with short essays rather than an exhausting book, a book she might never live to finish. This book collects the best of her blog.Her book's title comes from the last line of its first essay, one called "In Your Spare Time." This was triggered by a questionnaire she received from Harvard for her 60th class reunion. (She actually graduated from Radcliffe in 1951, but Radcliffe was affiliated with Harvard.) One question asked what she did in her spare time.Le Guin reflects on how the meaning of the phrase "spare time" changes as one ages. For younger people it means "leisure time," whatever time is left after work and after household chores and parenting and other responsibilities are taken care of. At some point, after retirement, virtually all time becomes leisure time, meaning people can use their time however they wish. At least this seems true in theory, however untrue it may be in practice. Yet because time grows short as we age, there really is none to spare.From there Le Guin goes on to tackle a variety of subjects, some relating to aging, others to literature, nature, her cat and, in one of her most entertaining pieces, putting our soldiers in camouflage. "I find it not only degrading but disturbing that we dress our soldiers in clothes suitable to jail or the loony bin, setting them apart not by looking good, looking sharp, but by looking like clowns from a broken-down circus."As for her cat, she writes about Pard more than any other topic: how she got him, how he misbehaves only when he has an audience, how he catches mice but doesn't know what to do with them, and so on. Another essay focuses on a much bigger cat, a captive lynx that captivates her.
    • 4/5
      In 2010, after discovering that author Jose Saramago had started a blog, Le Guin decides that she too could express herself in that medium. Here is collected a few dozen of her posts from 2010-2014, covering diverse topics such as getting old, writing, responding to fan letters, observations of her cat Pard, and the delight of soft-boiled eggs.As a fantasy fan, I couldn't help but have heard of Le Guin though this is my first introduction to her works. I've most often seen her quoted in defending genre fiction (particularly science fiction and fantasy) as not being secondary to more literary fiction beloved by critics, so I knew I liked her. In this collection, though I often didn't agree with her political statements, I found much food for thought and enjoyed her way of expressing herself whether she was definite about something ("Old age is for anybody who gets there.") or grappling with questions ("What is the way to use anger to fuel something other than hurt, to direct it away from hatred, vengefulness, self-righteousness, and make it serve creation and compassion?"). The descriptions of her cat were especially delightful to me, and interspersed in some of the heavier topics were a respite and made it easier for me to keep reading "one more essay..." before putting the book down.