‘No Time to Spare’

By Ursula K. Le Guin, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 240 pages, $22

Mixed in with the serious moments are a lot of purely playful ones (all of these essays originated as blog posts, and have the fleet tone of that genre). There’s a meditation on the best way to eat a softboiled egg — tap it neatly, or decapitate it with a whack? — and a great many about Le Guin’s trouble-making cat, Pard. The combination of light and heavy subjects works just right.

In the last few years Le Guin has published little or no new fiction or poetry, but has put out a book of collected novellas, an updated edition of her admirable writing guide (“Steering the Craft”), and now two compendiums of shorter texts in as many years.

Is it sentimental to speculate that she is sweeping her little corner of life tidy? Odds, ends, floating thoughts on Steinbeck, curse words and cats — the larger forces within her spent, but her mind still alive with things to say? Maybe. Certainly I would love to read her rebuttal of the notion.

“Sometimes I notice a teenager in the family group,” she writes early in the book, “present in body — smiling, polite, apparently attentive — but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.” What a lovely moment of sympathy, of attention. Deep down there: that is where Le Guin has taken readers for decade after decade, and where, these essays show, she is capable of taking them still.