DNF @ Page 20. I'm just not into super-fantasy stuff. shrug

Really, really mixed feelings. On one hand, I love Le Guin's ability to paint a picture with her words and the writing is beautiful. On the other hand, her writing can bore me to death. The underlying ideas behind this book were really powerful, I liked the story.

I didn't feel attached to the main character, let alone any characters- this book focused more on worldbuilding and, even when the focus was on the protagonist's journey, I hardly ever felt a connection w the protagonist himself, even though the whole journey is supposed to be relatable and introspective

I really liked the magic system and how it was rooted in language. That was a cool idea to play around with and I like how she used it

Overall, I think the writing dragged a bit too much. Made it hard to pay attention and hard to finish ( )

"For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after."

I decided to read this book for the same reason I decided to read Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki. I love the films of Studio Ghibli, and one of the biggest reasons I love them is their stories. I also feel like Spirited Away has a lot in common with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which will always be two of my favorite books. I had also already read The Borrowers series before seeing The Secret Life of Arietty and have always loved it.
However, I must admit it has been a while since I have seen Goro Miyazaki's Tales from Earthsea but I remember loving it and that the story was fascinating. So, though I didn't know quite what to expect coming into this book, I had an inkling of some of the themes. Now that I have completed the book I would like to watch the movie again, though I know it is actually based on the whole Earthsea Cycle and not just the first book and that it also ties in other bits and creations of it's own to make a new story.

I learned some things reading this book. Ursula K. Le Guin is a beautiful writer. Everything feels like it has more to it, each sentence sometimes feels like something you could spend a while meditating on-- which honestly is so in sync with the story itself. The scenes with the mysterious shadow were a perfect amount of creepy, though this story is not "horror," I won't lie, I had a nightmare about the shadow. And while I didn't enjoy the nightmare, I appreciate the fact of how deep the creepiness had sunk in. And it wasn't just the description of the way the thing looked, but it was the tone across the whole of the tale, the feeling Ged had of being followed by some unnameable force, all the symbols it held...I feel like it had so many angles that make it truly a frightening thing. It comes from darkness, it is the unknown, it comes from the gate of death, it seeks to posses, it has no name, it has no shadow itself but is pure darkness for it IS the shadow, it is the dark side of a human soul, it is the nightmares that chase you each night and into the waking day, It is the fear that you either run from or face but must learn to live with, it is the thing that you have come to create and cannot wish another to carry its burden-- it truly encompasses so much, and yet in all things, truly, it is the definition of a shadow. And though I guessed a part of what the ending might be, I honestly never even thought of the final weapon Ged is able to use.

I love the world building in this book as well and honestly can't wait to read the others to see them built upon this foundation. I love the way the magic is done in this world, that you have to know the true name of a thing, the true essence of it, in order to have any control over it. But, having control over any of it, from the smallest pebble to the greatest mind, even for just a moment, effects the equilibrium of everything which is balanced in the world and so you must take that into account with each choice while using this magic. I love that there is a story to it, that the system is explained, because though I enjoy books about powers and magic, it really bugs me when you never know the mechanics of it or why or how it is. It just IS. When Magic is used in a way like it is used in this book, it can serve such a greater purpose and as this author has done, the learning of the use of magic can lend knowledge, and at the same time requires knowledge, to and of the character's world and their place in it.

I feel like at this point it seems like I'm trying to call this book perfect or something, which I'm not, but it's just that it is honestly so beautiful and refreshing with it's symbols, intricacies, explanations, revelations, and the like. Maybe I would even have to say that this book probably has the best use of tone of any that I have read-- it is extremely fluid because of this.

I did feel as though here and there things got a bit too technical and lost my attention for just a moment, or where I wasn't exactly sure of the meaning of what I was reading, but this was seldom and usually if I went back over it a few times I could sort it out. This book is not long, and yet I feel like taking the time to read it slowly is the best way about it. While I wish that we could have learned a bit more of some of the other characters, I also see how the tale would have lost the intimacy of the main character and his bond to the shadow if the focus had been shifted too much. The only thing that I truly even probably had a problem with was that after the slower pacing of the beginning of the novel, the ending seemed much too fast. Though whether this could have been intended I am not sure because I could see a way that doing it that way would make sense but at the same time I always feel a little offset when I feel rushed at the end of a book. But even my criticisms hardly sound like ones...I think I am realizing even more while writing this how amazing I really think this book is. ( )

A Wizard of Earthsea was an early venture into "YA Fantasy" publishing, and it set much of the pattern for the wizard bildungsroman that later made the fortune of the world's richest woman. More than half a century after its original publication, it holds up very well. It is certainly a better book than its more "successful" imitators. I first read it when I was less than ten years old, and I had forgotten many of the details and much of the structure--despite in the interim having sampled some of the attempts to adapt it to the screen.

While the publishing press and the author herself have been quick to compare this high fantasy Earthsea to Tolkien's Middle Earth, I found the style far more reminiscent of Lord Dunsany, an author praised elsewhere by Le Guin with language similar to her remarks in the 2012 afterword to Wizard. There she mentions other fantasy literature that "mostly lurked in small secondhand bookshops smelling of cats and mildew" (262). To the extent that this book is an "epic" fantasy, it is more Odyssey than Illiad, deliberately spurning the matter of great wars and killer heroes.

As an orientation to esoteric wisdom, Le Guin's work far exceeds more recent tales of "wizard school." The teachings of Lao Tzu that she imbibed at her father's knee are evident in the magic of Earthsea. She has one clinker in her diction, where she misuses "adept" to mean "neophyte" (26). That lexical slip is far outweighed by such musings as this:

"You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do ..." (99, italics and ellipsis in original)

Le Guin quietly but consciously twitted racial preconceptions of US readers when writing this book, but she admittedly conformed to received gender types for fantasy literature (263). As a result, the business with Serret reflects Aleister Crowley's observation that "the neophyte is nearly always tempted by a woman."

My reread of this novel was undertaken with a view to reading the entire Earthsea cycle of six volumes. Only the first three of these had existed for my childhood reading. As a reading project, then, it shares elements of my mature returns to Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising books (a series about magic enjoyed in my childhood) and Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle (a reread in order to approach the volumes subsequently published). I'm only encouraged by this first book.

I'm hoping the next book is a little less disparaging of women's magic. ( )