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

[kore]

And it was such a well-loved, well-rewarded, enduring series! The way people reacted, you would have thought Granny had sucker punched them with brass knuckles. I think probably the most important thing about it is it freed her to go on and write other things later on, like -- as coffeeandink points out -- Solitude, Seggri and especially Five Ways to Forgiveness, which are all much more sophisticated dwellings on themes of power and brutality and oppression (which makes them sound like sermons, and they aren't). But it was like Tehanu had to come first.

In some ways, her much later (and also well-rewarded) trilogy Annals of the Western Shore is also a response to those first three books, with Voices corresponding to Tombs and also having a thorny rebellious heroine. I am really fond of her and the escaped slave hero of the last book.

You might like the novel Beginning Place, about two young adults who find a portal to a fantasy world! (It's not YA) True to Le Guin form, the fantasy world exists in itself and is not just a playground for them, and the portrayal of the real gritty world is great, like future Portland in Lathe of Heaven (a man's dreams come literally true), another big favourite of mine. There are a LOT of great Le Guin books and people have many different favourites, so even if you bounce off the rest of Earthsea you might want to try her other books. Like sovay said Le Guin has a very wide range while always remaining herself. Her short story collections are also excellent (the only one I didn't like was Changing Planes, altho a lot of people don't like Searoad, set entirely in the "mundane" PNW. I love it though).