Jerusalem Demsas: preference

Transcript context

…We agreed to go away and read and then talk about three books. Let’s start with Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed. The other books will be Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, and Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men. Ursula Le Guin — where do you want to start? I first read this book — I think I must have been early high school. I don’t know if this is what you were like when you were early high school, but I was very angry about a lot of things. It was hard to have conversations about anything to do with politics without getting very upset or angry. That’s, I think, what a lot of my peers felt at the time. I think reading science fiction — it’s like a way of having conversations about politics without having to necessarily feel that. It actually felt like a real entry point into how to start having discussions without all of that. Not that the emotion itself was bad, but it made it hard sometimes to have productive conversations if you were overcome by the things you were feeling. The Dispossessed is great. We can start, I suppose, with maybe a very basic plot summary. Do you want to do that or should I? Let me first say, I also read it early in high school. I was 13 or 14. It was such a different reading this time around. The first time I read it, I didn’t really like it. I quite liked Ursula Le Guin, but this one — it was somehow, at the time, too communal to me, too utopian. Of course, I read it now, it seems almost the exact opposite of that. Do you want to start with a very brief plot summary?…

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