Reading: A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else

Ursula Le Guin's A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else is one of the books that got me through my teens, and although I hadn't read it for years before finding a copy in the second-hand bookshop in Stratford last week I've often thought about it. Unlike most of Le Guin's work, it's not SF; instead, it's a fairly simple story about two geeky contemporary teenagers. It's also less than 100 pages long, which I hadn't remembered, but even so it's probably the truest depiction I've ever come across of what it's like to be a thoughtful teenage loner, trying to learn how to do the human act and work out what the point of all the years stretching ahead of you are. It's also one of the very few books I encountered in my teens that touched on the subject of depression (the other one is Fire and Hemlock); it doesn't refer to it by name, but when I first read the narrator's description of the mental fog that descends on him I knew that he was feeling the same way I was, and I didn't feel quite so alone any more.

Thirty years later, I still found it beautiful and moving and insightful; it was good to be reminded of some of the things it taught me about living but which I'd half forgotten over the years.

(Interestingly, I think the UK edition must have been anglicised in a way I don't think happens so much now; there are references to "maths" and "primary school" and a few other things that now strike me as incongruous in an American book.)