To Judge A Book: 1: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

I sought after this book having read about it in Paul Martin's Counting Sheep, a psychological book on sleep and dreams. It took me a while to find it, as many of the used book stores here in San Antonio had at least ten other books of Le Guin's, but never The Lathe of Heaven.

I finally broke down and went to alibris.com, which I have been trying to avoid for the particular reason that I always end up buying and buying and buying. Which I did. But I did find the book, and I have just finished reading it.

The information I got from Paul Martin's book was that Lathe was about a man who could "effectively dream," which is to dream and change reality.

This is such a poor, poor description of this book because there is so much more to it. First of all, "effectively dreaming" does not just change the immediate reality of the dreamer. It changes reality for everyone and everything, it changes the entire continuum of existence. It was a very deep and in depth description of something so completely off the charts, and I must applaud Ms. Le Guin for keeping it so...understandable.

But it was also about humanity, and in a mirror sense, it brought to mind Huxley's A Brave New World. It dealt with the assumption that each person knows what utopia is or should be, knows what is best for humanity, know what things that humanity can do without.

At one point, without going too far into a spoiler, the dreamer, George Orr, dreams that there is no more racial inequality...a noble dream to be sure. But that turns everyone in the entire world gray, and he can feel that horrendous loss of uniqueness and individuality that this creates, and even the loss of someone who was born because of racial inequality, someone whom he loved.

Which leads us to the fact that this was also a love story. A beautiful, tragic, unending, unparalleled love story. But it's within the lines of the rest of the stories.

This book, while not as great a book as I hoped it would be in regards to my sleep and dreaming studies, was ever more better a book than it could have been if it had lived up to my sub-standard expectations of a classic. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who is unsure of which book to pick up next.

Please don't be offput by the fact that it is, to an extent, a science fiction book, because to categorize it into that genre alone would be a heartbreaking mistake. There are so many elements to this book, it is hard comprehending that Le Guin put it all not only in one book, but in one book only 175 pages long.