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For an explanation of why I read this, click here.

Choosing a short story collection is a little bit of a cheat, given that all the stories appearing in this book were published earlier than the collection. But this is a book I've been trying to find a replacement copy of for years, mine being worn enough that I don't like handling it, so this was also partly an excuse to replace it. (I actually ended up with this edition thanks to Amazon.in's selection of cheap books.)

I don't think I've ever given a full five stars to a short story collection. Maybe Connie Willis's Impossible Things. (checks records) Nope, not even that. There are always a few stories I don't love, enough that my experience as a whole isn't mind-blowing. So rating a collection or anthology can't reflect the beauty of the individual stories that are mind-blowing. Maybe that's unfair, but I've never come up with a better measure.

In this case, I'd read a couple of the stories individually, years ago. "Semley's Necklace" I remembered well, though I couldn't tell you where I encountered it (is it part of Rocannon’s World?), and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" was assigned reading in high school. The others were all new to me, and there were only two I really didn't care for ("A Good Trip" and "A Trip to the Head," and I'm sure it's coincidence they both contain the word "trip," but they certainly tripped me up).

"Paris in April," which is a delightful tale about summoning "demons" from other periods of history, was Le Guin's first pro sale from 1962, and it really is fun. You can see hints of what her later style would become, for one, but it's still definitely her writing.

Some other favorites were "Things," about the end of the world and one brickmaker's response to it, and "The Day Before the Revolution," which was particularly poignant to me as I grow older, though I'm not as old as the protagonist of that story. "The Field of Vision" was sort of dull, right up until the last gut-punching paragraph, and then it could have been a Twilight Zone episode.

"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" may be Le Guin's most famous short story, and I can certainly see why. Her writing is luminous, her narrative voice confiding, and the contrast between the beauty of Omelas and its dark secret is another gut punch. But it is also the sort of story that seemed profoundly meaningful when I was young and simply raises questions now that I'm older. It is a representation of a philosophical puzzle rather than a story, I think, because in essence it asks readers to consider what their response would be. Everyone wants to believe they would walk away, but would they?

I'm sure my ambivalence is also related to having argued with readers and critics who want to read in this story an indictment of Christianity. Given that Christ was not a mentally-deficient child who had no choice in being a scapegoat, this is not an argument I'm at home to.

Since I bought this omnibus collection, I now have the stories of The Compass Rose to read someday. It's been a while since I read a Le Guin novel, so I can't say whether she was better at long or short form, but I would recommend most of these stories as a good introduction to her early fiction.