Holly Via Gorski

Today during a conversation with my boss about books we enjoyed, she told me about her experience re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.

She first read it in the 1970s when she was in her mid-twenties, and at that time she thought it was all about gender roles, gender identity and the box it puts us in from the moment of our birth. She recently read it again, in her late fifties, and had a different experience. While she loved the book both times, the second time she realized it was clearly a book about diplomacy; about the politics involved as the citizens of Winter jockeyed for position in their dealings with the man from Earth.

I haven’t read The Left Hand of Darkness (I will now), but as a writer I immediately thought of what a rich and complex work it must be for my boss to have had such different experiences with it. Certainly we all do this with any work; as readers we focus on the areas that interest us and glean what we most desire or need from its pages, but not every novel lends itself to this as easily as Le Guin’s. Most of my own re-reading experiences have been disappointing: novels that spoke to me at 17 seem simple or didactic now.

I’m wondering, Gentle Readers: which books have changed meaning for you over time? If you write, how do you weave in multiple themes? Which other authors are particularly good at this?

Yesterday I spent too much time reading articles online about the fact that Mormons worldwide are in an uproar over Big Love’s plans to depict their temple endowment ceremony on TV. Today I spent about an hour trying to write a thoughtful blog post about it, but I kept veering off-topic into my own experiences as a former member of the LDS church and that’s really not what I want to write about.

A few minutes ago, reading more online, I stumbled upon an apology from The Salt Lake Tribune to its readers. The paper is apologizing for running a photo yesterday of a Big Love cast member in costume for the scene alongside its article about the controversy. In this photo, the character is wearing LDS temple clothing. In reality, an actress is in costume. I’m going out on a limb here and assuming that the Big Love costume department didn’t raid an LDS temple for actual temple robes, OK? Someone made an approximation of the real deal. It’s called theater.

But oh, no – in response to reader outcry, The Salt Lake Tribune has apologized for running the photo in its print edition and pulled it from not only the web version of the story, but from the newspaper’s photo archives. Here’s what they said about it:

Forget whatever else I might have had to say — this is the most outrageous part of the entire foolish melodrama. Now we’re so sensitive to the possibility of offending people that a newspaper can’t even run a relevant photo along with its story? A photo of a fictional character in costume?!

I guess it really is true that freedom of the press is dead. Long live the Theocracy, Utah. 

I’ve had this belt for 7 or 8 years. It occurred to me today that a picture of it would say more than a long line of whiny blog posts. (Infer whining – or not – as you wish.)