Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

In the days of my youth, my friend Emma recommended A Wizard of Earthsea to me, and I got a few chapters in and didn’t like it and promptly swore off Ursula Le Guin forever. However, the Newbery project forced me to give The Tombs of Atuan a try, and I am enraged to inform you that in fact Le Guin is just as good as everyone has been telling me for years.

Our heroine is Tenar, who at the age of six became high priestess of the Nameless Ones, and as such is called Arha, the Eaten One. (Eaten by the Nameless Ones, you understand.) She is mistress not only of the Tombs of Atuan, but over the Labyrinth, an endless tangle of complicated underground tunnels, and also over the Undertomb, a vast underground cavern where it is blasphemy to strike a light…

Until one day, Arha finds that a man has broken into the Undertomb: a wizard holding a shining staff which lights up the crystals on the walls. She chases him into the Labyrinth and locks the door behind him, so he will never get out, but die of hunger and thirst. Only Arha, fascinated by this intruder into the unvarying routine of her life, can’t resist bringing him water. Such has been the emotional aridness of her childhood that she frames this to herself as a way to torment him: she’ll tell him that the water is in a certain room, and sometimes it will be there and sometimes it won’t!

(After the first time, in fact, she always brings water when she says she will. Can’t miss a chance to ask him about the outside world, after all.)

The book does a fantastic job invoking Arha’s headspace, as well as the physical setting of the underground Undertomb and Labyrinth, these dark, winding, featureless halls that have to be navigated by counting doorways, where it is so easy to get lost. Just an incredibly vivid sense of the space.

What I’m Reading Now

Lina Rather’s Sisters of the Vast Black, recommended by oracne as Nuns! In! Space!!! You know how I am about nuns, so of course I had to give it a go. The nuns travel through space in a living spaceship, which currently yearns to mate with another ship, thus thrusting the nuns into the theological quandary of whether a spaceship that is also a nunnery can be allowed to breed.

In Dracula, Lucy Westenra grows wan and pale! Worse, Mina has been torn from Lucy's side, rushing across the continent to care for Jonathan Harker, leaving no one but Lucy’s ineffective mother to stand between Lucy and whatever mysterious creature keeps transforming into various red-eyed animals and calling her in the night. Doubtless this is not worrisome in the least.

What I Plan to Read Next

I guess I gotta read the rest of the Earthsea books.

Actually, I have a question about this: my impression is that everyone considers the first four top notch (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu), but I’ve heard less about the last two (Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind). Should I read all of them, or just the first four?

Comments

[oracne]

In my opinion, LeGuin's later work is in dialogue with her younger self's ideas, and goes deeper, so it's worth it to read the later books for that. You could jump from The Tombs of Atuan to Tehanu if you want - note that depending on your spoiler tolerance, an event in The Farthest Shore is spoiled in Tehanu, which is set many years later. ZOMG I love Tehanu. And Tenar. The Other Wind needs to go last.

[osprey_archer]

I think from now on I'll go in order - that is, drop back to start with A Wizard of Earthsea, then go forward from there.

[asakiyume]

I am enraged to tell you... --Ahahaha, I love you so much.

That was the only book of the Earthsea trilogy that stuck with me! I loved it--I did fan art for it (before "fan art" was a thing--I just always doodled the people I was reading about in stories). It **was** vivid--I've never read another story like it (which, I realize, says more about my limited reading than anything else.)

I recall liking the world of A Wizard of Earthsea--all those islands!-- but I also recall liking the woodcut illustrations at the front of each chapter of the paperbacks I read as much as the content of the chapter itself. And I didn't finish The Farthest Shore; it unsettled me. That was when I was a teen; I could probably handle it now.

[osprey_archer]

Haven't been so mad about liking a book since I read the Hunger Games. Everyone says it's great, and they're right!!!! How very dare.

I don't think I've ever read anything like The Tombs of Atuan either! I'm sure there are other stories where you could compare certain elements (the underground labyrinth etc), but the way those elements are put together is really unlike anything else.

[kore]

I had that same edition, the illos are great -- by Gail Garraty. There's what looks like a beautiful hardcover ed but I've never seen it for sale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tombs_of_Atuan#/media/File:TheTombsOfAtuan.jpg There's a Charles Vess illustrated edition too.

[aurumcalendula]

I remember really liking The Tombs of Atuan! I think I've only read Tenar's books in The Earthsea Cycle, tbh. (ETA: that I knew of - it looks like she's in The Other Wind too! *adds to list*)

[osprey_archer]

Glad that this entry led you to another Tenar book! Always fun to discover a new addition to an old favorite series.

[kore]

Other Wind is really good. It's got a beautiful reconsidering of her vision of the afterlife from Farthest Shore. I really love the "minor" character who opens the book (there are no minor characters in LG of course).

[coffeeandink]

Tehanu was extremely contentious when published, but maybe it's settled into respectability by now. My favorites were The Farthest Shore and The Other Wind, but that may have been a minority opinion. I do think the whole thing is worth reading. Tehanu in particular is a response to and partial rewriting of the earlier books, so I would strongly recommend reading it after the first three instead of going straight to it after Tombs. Not so much for plot spoilers but because certain images will strike harder and differently.

[osprey_archer]

I have the very vague sense that I have heard something about Tehanu controversy, but I can no longer remember what. Certainly it's always dangerous to publish a new installment of a series long after everyone thought the series was over.

[sovay]

Should I read all of them, or just the first four?

I happen not to like Tehanu, which is the transitional book between the first three and the last two, at all, but I am very fond of the last two, so I would continue to them. One of the stories in Tales of Earthsea is one of my favorites out of the entire world.

[osprey_archer]

My plan right now is to read the whole series - it's possible I will jump ship, but probably I'll go all the way through.

[asakiyume]

Amazed and interested in the variety of opinions expressed so far: me, not able to finish The Farthest Shore (as a teen! as a teen! I'm [probably] different now), and coffeeandink liking it best; several people loving Tehanu, and sovay not liking it ... I wonder what that says about LeGuin as a writer or about those stories. Or about people you're friends with, or--I don't even know!

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, it's interesting to see such a spread of opinions! Often when people offer opinions about an author's work there's more of a consensus about which books are best and worst (although generally at least one outlier loves X book that everyone else hates). But here it's all over the map except for a general agreement that Earthsea is worth reading.

[coffeeandink]

I actually didn't love Le Guin's fiction when I was a kid, though her non-fiction (particularly The Language of the Night and "The Fisherman's Daughter") had a huge impact on me and the ways I thought about writing. I grew to love her fiction with the flowering of relatively late and extraordinary novellas and novelette in the 90s, particularly "Solitude", "The Matter of Segri", and Five Ways to Forgiveness. I still don't hear these talked about as much as her earlier work, although they were well recognized & frequently awarded when they came out.

Le Guin had such a long career and was willing to reconsider and build upon earlier work that she just has a lot of different entry points depending on taste and personal experience. I think people tend to recommend the first three Earthsea books, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed, just because they were so influential, but that may or may not intersect with personal favorites.

[sovay]

I wonder what that says about LeGuin as a writer or about those stories.

She offered a wide range.

[eglantiere]

and I am enraged to inform you - awwww :D

the high point of the series is probably Tehanu, where le guin reconsiders the more unconsciously informed setup of the earlier books from the explicitly feminist standpoint, and it produces an unpolished, raw, angry and beautiful book. But TFS is very beautiful too.. the tales are patchy in terms of quality, but TOW , while very well-written, imo makes a weird thematic swerve and ends up solving a problem that wasn't really a problem instead of the problems that Tehanu et al set up. but honestly, it's still worth reading. (but i'm biased and i should get back to my Reread All Le Guin project soon.)

[osprey_archer]

I don't NEED another new author with a large backlist to explore and yet HERE I AM.

[kore]

Tombs was the first Le Guin I ever read, off a mimeographed list (remember those?) of "sff books for young readers" from the Santa Fe Public Library, and one of the first fantasy novels I ever read too. It has a really special place in my heart. After that I went back and read Wizard and bounced right off it. Fortunately the library also had her stunning first collection Wind's Twelve Quarters and a friend had Left Hand of Darkness and then I found Orsinian Tales, a really extraordinary collection of short stories about an imaginary country, and Language of the Night (essays) and that was pretty much that. Farthest Shore is good, but I was SO disappointed it didn't have Tenar in it. Tehanu is....a grand re-visioning of her earlier famous loved trilogy, re-vision in the Adrienne Rich sense, a very powerful feminist stocktaking. It's extremely divisive. Tales from Earthsea is a very good collection and you need it to understand The Other Wind, which a lot of people thought was weak, but I liked it a lot. I think you could read just the first four, but Tales and Other Wind are definitely worth it imho. Definitely don't read Tehanu without reading Wizard and Shore, though.

[osprey_archer]

I think I was just a little bit too young for the era of mimeographed lists, although I DID have a photocopied flyer of all the Newbery Award winners which I hoarded, and carefully checked books off of as I went, and I wish I still had it because it would have been DEEPLY SATISFYING to check the last book off the very first list that I started with.

My plan right now is to do the rest of Earthsea in order! After that we'll see where my Le Guin journey takes me.

[philomytha]

At some point I’m going to have to revisit LeGuin. I read all four Earthsea books as a teenager and they didn’t make much impression on me, I think I was hoping for more Tolkien and they are definitely not that. I imagine my reaction will be like yours: enraged to discover that’s they’re really good!

[osprey_archer]

How DARE they be good when I'd already written them off! The sheer effrontery.

[genarti]

Oh, the impotent rage/frustration/laughter of finding that something hyped to the point of exhaustion is, in fact, actually really good, dammit!

The Tombs of Atuan was the first Le Guin I read, too. I picked it up at random in the library as a preteen or teen (I honestly have no idea), drawn probably by the dramatic cover, and was utterly swept away by the atmosphere. I read A Wizard of Earthsea later, and didn't love it with the same fervor but it honestly probably had a more formative effect on my thoughts about numinousness and language and magic in fantasy; I'm 99% certain I read The Farthest Shore but I don't remember anything about it. I've been meaning to reread the whole series and the ones that came out afterward for ages. I really should.

[osprey_archer]

How DARE the hype be fully justified, honestly. So unfair of them!

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, when I read them as a child, I think I got some kind of omnibus version, but if I hadn't had that, and obv then immediately read Tombs of Atuan and loved it, I wouldn't have bothered with any more either!

Tehanu is good. I seem to vaguely remember liking The Other Wind but I mainly do just like the ones with Tenar in, really!

[osprey_archer]

Very sad to learn the book right after Tombs of Atuan DOESN'T have Tenar, honestly. It seems like such an oversight! Glad that Le Guin realized she needed another Tenar book to round out her story.

[cyphomandra]

I picked Tombs of Atuan up off a bookclub display table when I was 8 and it absolutely blew me away. I then went back and read the first one and loved that as well, but although I liked The Farthest Shore I missed Tenar.

(And then years later I got Tenar and didn’t like it at all! I liked it more last time I reread it, where it seemed more all of a piece with all the other books, but there’s still a very strong overlay of disappointment)

[osprey_archer]

Follow up to The Tombs of Atuan with no Tenar... hard to read the book without going "But what about Tenar?" perhaps.

[littlerhymes]

Coming in late to say I am very amused but also charmed by the wide variety of opinions. Please continue to read and post!

[osprey_archer]

Apparently mentioning Le Guin brings ALL the opinions out of the woodwork!