Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
-- Ursula K. #LeGuin, "The Tombs of Atuan", Book #2 of #Earthsea
The Sewing Circle: Hollywood's Female Stars Who Loved Other Women
2.75 stars
This was another impulse borrow, but unfortunately a rare miss from Queer Liberation Library. It was published in 1995 and it feels perhaps even more dated than that, with some problematic terminology and sensationalist assumptions.
There isn't really an overarching historical argument, much less a rigorous methodology. The book is just a string of seemingly unrelated anecdotes about women in old Hollywood who were probably queer in some way. A few fun factoids, but not what I'm looking for in my queer nonfiction.
Book cover of the Sewing Circle. Four headshots of glamorous women from the Golden Age of Hollywood, with their eyes covered by black rectangles as if they were censored.
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin (graphic novel adapted by Fred Fordham)
4.75 stars
Earthsea is such a masterpiece that means so much to me, so I was skeptical at first. But it was an immediate green flag that Le Guin's son initially reached out to Fordham because he loved his work and wanted to see his mother's works adapted as a graphic novel.
This is so gorgeous, absolutely stunning illustrations with soft, cinematic lighting and sparse text. It's basically long sequences of evocative, painterly images with an occasional direct quotation lifted from the original book. It genuinely made me view and love this story in a new way. I really hope Fordham keeps adapting the rest of the Earthsea books, because I want to keep returning to his version of Le Guin's world.
Just started this absolutely massive 50th anniversary tome of a #book, the complete illustrated edition of Ursula Le Guin's Books of #Earthsea. A bit unwieldy to read, but really beautiful, with colored illustrations. I love it already, and I have just begun.
Front cover of "The Books of Earthsea, Complete Illustrated Edition" by Ursula Le Guin. It shows a beatufully drawn picture of a red dragon in the foreground and a yellow in the background (as well as two more who are far enough in the background to be drawn in grey), hovering over a stormy sea with a little boat with a single, small person in it.