Always Coming Home (book review)

Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★★★ Not a novel, not quite a short story/poetry collection, Always Coming Home is a thorough exploration of an imagined post-apocalyptic rural utopia in a far-future Napa Valley. The book mixes narrative biographies, folk tales, traditional songs, modern songs and poetry, fragments of novels and plays, drawings and maps, all interspersed with scholarly reports on anything from festivals and mythology to architecture, and musings by the anthropologist doing the research and interviews. (“Pandora” as she calls herself is either somehow from our time and society, or from a society more like our own. Which is unimportant, since either way she’s from outside the world as the Kesh would consider it, and knows us well enough to connect to the real audience.) The Kesh revere spirals, and so it’s fitting that the book isn’t linear, but wrapped around itself and the central story of Stone Telling. Her story is split into three sections: how she met her father (a soldier from…