I haven't had much interest in books growing up, either it was hard for me to visualize specific landscapes or picture dialogue or how things are said within a scene. As descriptive as fiction can get, I always struggled to picture much of anything fantasical due to my own visual library for that genre being very limited. But as it turns out, all you need is a good audiobook and highlighter sticky notes and it's been a lot easier being able to engage with the reading material.
The Earthsea series was written by Ursula K. Le Guin, the setting takes place within the large fictional archipelago of Havnor, made up of multiple islands with various civilizations. Magic itself plays a specific role in various occupations, from weather work for ships to have smooth sailing to court sorcery for entertainment. The first three books revolved around a sorcerer named Ged who would eventually be known as The Sparrowhawk, a wizard who will eventually become one of the greatest and most powerful magic users in the land. I'm still reading through much of the books currently, and I'm doing my best to keep myself from getting spoiled much of what the story has to offer! The worldbuilding is one of my favorite aspects of this series, and it's been my main draw to getting myself back into writing again.
Because I'm reading through each of the books in the series, I'd like to condense my thoughts down for each in the series before giving a big ol overview of my thoughts on it as a whole. This section will be updated for each book I read through!
only in silence the word...
Le Guin is truly a master of showcasing character and worldbuilding, and starting this series left me in awe of concepts and ideas that genuinely blew me away!
I listened to the audiobook read by Harlan Ellison, the writer behind the famous short story 'I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream'. It gave me a bit of whiplash given the nature of his writings, but I was in awe of how he conveyed a level of genuine excitement and fantasical wonderment as he read each passage. He's very animated with how he speaks, and to my knowledge (and the Libby app as well), it was the only book in the series I could find an audiobook of. Going forward, much of the series is narrated by Rob Inglis, but he doesn't give that same level of enthusiasm Harlan has. I wish more audiobooks were more authentic in keeping the reader engaged.
The story revolves around the renowned wizard known as the Sparrowhawk, telling the story of his life and struggles to become the person he is. Le Guin stated that she wondered how popular wizards of the time (around the 60s) like Gandalf or Merlin gained their renown. How did they start out? How did they reach a level of contentment in their pursuits of great magic? And in that thought, Ged became a more fleshed out concept of that idea because the focus is on his character, rather than how previous iterations of sorcerers exist to further the heroes on their adventure.
This book was pretty progressive for the time it was written, having the protagonist be a man of color and flipping many of the central themes fantasy tends to lead towards (which, in much of the popular ones, is just fantasy racism with orcs or similar). A breath of fresh air of a read, and my book is full of highlighter tape keeping track of the various intricacies of the world Le Guin crafts. The Taoist themes of a cosmic balance between the elements of the world make the setting feel more lived in, making the rules easy to understand and more complicated the deeper you look. There's a lot more to be covered in the second book once I finish that up, but one factor I found fascinating was the concept of true names. Given to various objects, people, and some rarely reveal their own names or are given a new title to go by. To know a person or object's true name is to hold power over it, and many wizards study the elements of the world to learn the original names of things like rocks or water. The form of the object can be changed, but it will still hold their original name regardless of the ones humans have assigned to them.
As a coming of age story we also see that Ged is not a perfect man, unlike wizards written before him already experienced with the world and how it works, he's still in his early stages of his life. Bound to the mistakes any young mortal lad can do. Much of the story is him learning to control the power he holds, and how dangerous the world can be if unprepared. He even decides to go to a wizard school away from the island he grew up on, but it's just a chapter or so of his life that comes and goes. Not without consequence, though...
We see Ged's curiousity get the better of him throughout the book, leaving the home he knows for knowledge and independence, but getting a lot more than what he bargained for by summoning something terrible. He goes from escaping a looming shadow borne of his own mistakes to rising up from them. Ged finds balance in his own life by confronting that part of him, and it's an insipiring message to leave readers on. Much of his story is told by many in praise, but the tale of him overcoming the shadow that haunted over him for much of his early years would not be written in the stories of the world itself, rather, it was a personal one that the reader and his friend Vetch could understand. I really appreciate how grounded the characters and world are, even in a fantastical setting the rules of the world are well established.
Overall, I enjoyed reading through this book! Using various things like audiobooks and highlighter tape greatly helped me engage with the text better, and there's a lot I feel I haven't covered yet in this review. Maybe I'll look back at these sections in the future for rewrites to make things sound a little more concise, but for now I can say I enjoyed this book greatly.
A bonus is that I got the illustrated version of the entire Earthsea collection and absolutely adored the art that Charles Vess did for various scenes in the book. Highly recommend checking his work out because the compositions are Gorgeously drawn for the book and establish the feel of the world through these illustrated pages so well. Below is a sketch for one of the scenes he illustrated for and I'd post more because it's all So good, but there'd be too many to load for the page!
