Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 24th, 2022 07:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat 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 byoracne 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?
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?
