Hi there, Samarth here.

Our next book club meet is next week on 11th July to discuss The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. Timing is 3-5 pm in Andheri East - I will send details to attendees.

A couple of folks asked for extension for the writeup email, so moving it from 5th to 8th July (Wednesday). Please share your thoughts by then. (ICYMI, details in the previous email).

And if you are even 70% into the book by then, that’s completely fine. (Also, a quick heads-up on whether you plan to join would immensely help with logistics, so please drop me a note either way.)

More on the book when we meet, but now that I have so many of you on the mailing list, let me link you to three things from the legendary writer: a speech, an essay, and a short story. Even if you were not able to read this book, let this be your entry point for Le Guin.

1) Her acceptance speech at the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Here is an excerpt I often return to when I think about why I write:

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.

…

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

2) Her essay Staying Awake in Harper’s, on the alleged decline in reading.

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

3) A short story: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

It’s one of my favourite short stories, which, when I first read, made me reflect on my life in Mumbai, and what I choose to see and not see.

Let’s celebrate this legendary writer in our meet next week. But even if you are not able to make it or read the book in time, I hope this email is a nudge for you to explore her work. Our world would be better if more of us read and shared her work.

PS: The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky is our book for September. So, a fun literary fact: the Omelas short story I linked above takes on exactly the same moral conflict that appears in the remarkable The Grand Inquisitor chapter in the Karamazov. I hope this serves as a teaser. :)

Best,

Samarth