Book Review: A Wizard of Earthsea

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Hello all. ;-) I'm writing a series of book reviews on Good Reads. I thought I could share my reviews here as well.

I want to get into the practice of thinking more about my impressions of a book. I thought that writing down these thoughts can help me to expand the reading experience and deepen my appreciation of good writing. This is a bit of a goal of mine in part because I'm going to need to write a lot in the future for Innkeep.


-----
I'm going to avoid any plot details in this review, focusing just on my general thoughts on what impressed me so much about A Wizard of Earthsea. Really, this is a review about being surprised. And surprised three times over.


While I enjoy reading SFF, I always start a new book or series with some trepidation. One of the things that makes the genre so special is what can also make it a real chore: the creation of entirely new worlds by the author, with their own geographies, mythologies, languages, societies, histories, politics and so on. Even when a world is artfully deep, cohesive, and organic, the reader still has to move through that initial disconcerting phase of not knowing what the heck is going on. Who are these people? What is this place? What are the rules of magic here? Or what is the kind of technology they are using? Etc.

I find this initial phase of adjustment can make it really hard to enjoy a new SFF book. My mind wants to reject the reality of the names of all the places and people, refusing to take that vital step of suspending disbelief. My internal monologue is something like: "Well, you just made this all up, didn't you? Why should I feel invested in caring about this?" So long as I can get past the initial stage the feeling always passes. I start to "buy in" to the world as I get used to it, and have a good time. But I -do- need to get past that initial stage, and it's usually not easy. This difficulty has made me tend to shy away a bit from reading new SFF.

A Wizard of Earthsea was the first book I had read by Ursula Le Guin. (Somehow I had missed her work entirely as a teenager when I once really plowed through SFF). So I didn't really know what to expect. What first surprised me was that I was already on board after two or three pages. Honestly, I should say that I found that almost shocking. I am used to needing whole chapters of reading before everything feels suitably established for me to suspend my disbelief. I think part of this reason is how economical Le Guin is with deploying lore. She has a laser focus on the beating heart of the story she wants to tell, and dispenses with everything else. The lore is there, but it is strictly contained and doled out only as needed. The focus is always on the situation facing the main character.

Another thing that surprised me about A Wizard of Earthsea was just the pure quality of the prose. I will need to re-read Tolkien to see what I think of him as an adult, but having read a bit more SFF again last year and this year, Le Guin is easily the best. I must admit that there were certain sentences and paragraphs where I had to just put the book down and take a moment, they were so overwhelmingly good. There is a sense of poetry in Le Guin's prose. She can draw on the lyrical feelings of words to really take you beyond mere factual representation and into the sublime. Her accounts of sailing, of the elements of wind and rain, in particular, are as good as I have ever seen (Perhaps you could find similarities here with Homer, Melville, or Patrick O'Brian).

Finally, I was surprised at how Le Guin's story was so thematically deep. Superficially, it is a coming of age story, of a young man becoming a powerful wizard. But really, it is so much more than this. We should be very wary of analyzing literature in the sense of trying to "discover the underlying meaning" that the author secretly wants to tell us. Literature is not when an author dresses up an abstract position in pretty language, with the reader then tasked to undress it. The prose and the story already is the meaning. And yet, you can detect here so many interesting influences and ideas, that we can call this book philosophical in a broad sense. There is some Nietzsche perhaps. Some Heidegger. There is some Taoism. And it comes across through the language. It is a whole experience.

A Wizard of Earthsea immediately placed Le Guin as one of my very favorite authors. It is a must-read for anyone who enjoys good prose, let alone for fans of SFF. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5615207066

[Jubal]

Ooh, this was interesting & please do share more of them

Also, basically agreed on all counts, and you should definitely add le Guin's Always Coming Home to your to-read list because I'd be interested to see what you think of it. I definitely agree that le Guin's genius is often in the descriptive writing, she's a bit more impressionistic than Tolkien who sinks much more into the minutiae of a scene (though in a much more poetic way than, say, Martin). I think le Guin's approach probably often works better for more people (though I love both her and Tolkien's styles personally).

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Thank you. I've got some 17 SFF books I read in the past year or so that I'd like to review. Let's see if I can catch up to my current reading point. ><
I've finished the first four Earthsea books, as well as the Left Hand of Darkness, but I'd love to read more Le Guin. I'll put that on my list. I just grabbed The Dispossessed a few days ago, so I suppose that's first.

[Jubal]

I've only read Earthsea and Always Coming Home so I've got more for my list as well! And I've only got through three books this year so far so my likelihood of managing them isn't looking great. I'm hoping I'll get better with reading now the PhD is close to finished anyway.

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Congratulations on getting close to the finish! I'm enjoying reading fiction more again. But it helps that my PhD is on hold so I'm not reading non fiction all the time.