The Compass Rose by
Ursula K. LeGuin (1982; this edition 2005; Perennial, an imprint of Harper/Collins;
398 pages)
Last weekend my brother John
and his family, joined by my sister Susan, her husband Andy and son Kameron, went
to visit a town in the Marfa Lights area. While there they visited a bookstore and on a shelf outside offering free books John found this copy of The Compass Rose. Since he knew
that I liked Ursula K. LeGuin, he messaged me to ask if I had a copy and was
rather surprised to hear I did not. He picked it up, and when we went over to
his house for Friday movie night (this week Matinee and Freud’s Last
Session) he gave it to me.
When I brought it home and
looked it over, I was surprised. Before, I would have sworn I had never read it;
I knew I had never owned a copy. But as I examined story after story within
(there are twenty, each loosely arranged by the four points of the compass as
well as the zenith and the nadir; hence ‘the compass rose’) I realized that I
had read them all, and probably in a library copy. I had simply forgotten.
I am certainly happy to be
able to read them once more. I suppose I never bothered to buy a copy because
it didn’t have any ‘fantasy’ stories (according to a narrow definition – the tales
themselves are imaginatively fantastic). This softcover is a very handy size; I
must confess that at my age it’s becoming cumbersome to hold a paperback for
very long. It is an ex-library book, and this morning I did a little tidying
and protected the fraying top of the spine with transparent packing tape. And
so it enters the Archive.
This is the paperback cover
it had when it was first published in 1982, and a rose redolent of the times it is, too.
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