Bookish Thoughts

The Other Wind is the final (for now) book in the Earthsea series. And it is easily the best. The plot moves along at a good pace and is satisfactorily resolved. There are a ton of characters with interesting relationships that shift over the course of the novel. LeGuin even managed to devote an entire chapter to sailing without boring me. On the contrary, that time was used quite well for the development of various characters and the history of Earthsea. This book manages to pick up plot threads I'd thought long abandoned, like the dismal afterlife, and make them relevant again to the lives of both new and old characters. Many of my disappointments with the earlier books were addressed and resolved in this one. As rocky as the series has been, it honestly may have been worth it just to get to the end. The series as a whole has, unfortunately, left me wary of LeGuin's other work. I'll probably read The Left Hand of Darkness at some point, but I'm not s...

In Tales From Earthsea , LeGuin departs from the novel format to tell a collection of short stories set in various places and times in Earthsea. Although short stories is, perhaps, a generous term. Two of the five stories are closer to novellas in length. Overall this book was more successful than LeGuin's previous Earthsea novels. The shorter length gives her writing a focus it definitely needs. There are no lengthy passages about sailing, no extended diatribes about the differences between men and women. Instead we get some neat character studies, woven together with some history of Earthsea. The Finder is the longest of the five stories, taking up over 150 pages in my book. It tells the history of the wizard's school, how it was founded and why. And although I'm not quite sure I understand why the men decided to force their female peers out of the school, or why the women let them, it was fun to see this bit of Earthsea history, and to see what the wor...

Tehanu is the fourth book in the Earthsea cycle and another example of how up and down this series is. It's not quite as good as The Tombs of Atuan was, but it is significantly better than the other two books that came before it. Tehanu was written nearly three decades after the first two books, and it takes place in the winter of Ged and Tenar's lives. Ged has stepped down as archmage and is somewhat lost throughout the book. Tenar is a grandmother now, and trying to redefine herself again since her children have moved out of the house and her husband has died. She adopts a young girl, Therru, who was abused and is disfigured. The bulk of the book is pretty slow. It's mostly musings on feminism and how to start fresh when your life is mostly over. I liked the slow, meandering pace of the book. Although parts of it got preachy and, like Atuan , there were parts that made me wonder if LeGuin lives in the same world as I do. She talks at length about a woma...

The Farthest Shore  is the third book in Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea  cycle. It's also probably the weakest, which is sad. In reading this series and talking to other people, I'm discovering that LeGuin can be a bit hit or miss. She has some great books mixed in with some not-so-great books. This book really suffered from uneven pacing. Like the first book in the series, there were entire chapters devoted to sailing between islands. Action scenes seemed to come out of nowhere. At one point I had to re-read a page three times before I was satisfied that I hadn't missed anything; an chase had just started without warning. I also had a hard time accepting the philosophy of this book. Ged, the old, wise wizard, spends a lot of time trying to teach his young charge, Arren, that action is bad because it tends to upset the balance. Ged is a very passive character who mostly strives to be rather than to do. This is entirely at odds with the saving the world p...

The Tombs of Atuan  is the second book in the Earthsea cycle by Ursula LeGuin. This series is the first (and possibly only?) LeGuin tried her hand at YA. While the first book suffered from some pacing issues, the second book was orders of magnitude better. The second book shifts its focus away from Ged, protagonist of the first book. Instead it follows young Arha, nee Tenar, the head priestess of a dying religion. She's mostly in charge of making sure her gods are still being sacrificed to on a regular basis. But since so few people still worship, her life is pretty boring. This all changes when Ged breaks into her temple in an effort to steal an artifact. The two become friends and end up saving each other. The book is mostly interesting for being a feminist tale from the early 70s. Some themes are familiar, but others are strangely foreign. There are things that are basic facts of my life that LeGuin couldn't even imagine several decades ago. She talks ab...

A Wizard of Earthsea is the first of Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books. It's also the first YA book she ever wrote, according to a note at the end of the book, which may explain some of the issues I had with the pacing of the story. The book follows Ged, a boy who is born with a talent for magic. Over the course of the story he begins to study magic, heads off to a university for sorcerers, graduates, and faces some initial challenges. I think the rest of the series follows the remainder of his life, but the first book is really about him growing up. While the plot is a bit cliched at this point, I imagine it was fairly fresh when LeGuin wrote it back in the 60s. And I really enjoyed the world building. A country made of hundreds of islands isn't something I'm used to, and it was neat that sailing played such a large part in the story. Although there were parts when the sailing went on so long that I felt like I was playing Windwaker. I also really lik...