The Telling

The Telling is the eighth book in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish cycle and the seventh I've read. It is very much anthropology fiction, something Le Guin excels at. Her prose is well done, but the story in The Telling is very slow moving. The plot, if one could call it that, is all about the culture. The Hainish cycle includes some very good books. The Telling is perhaps the least of them.

Here is a quote from the book that particularly struck me: "If the Telling was a religion it was very different from Terran religions, since it entirely lacked dogmatic belief, emotional frenzy, deferral of reward to a future life, and sanctioned bigotry." - a succinct characterization of religions on our planet.