A Wizard of Earthsea

Rating:
4/5 stars

Re-reading because I don't actually think I understood this book when I was a teenager.

I'm waffling back and forth between 3.5 stars and 4 stars. The book was good overall. It seemed to draw inspiration from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and seemed to also be in the conventional style of the mythical Epic. I could imagine a bard somewhere telling this great story of this boy wizard who met a master, was trained, went to wizarding school, and continued on to greatness.

The book introduces the reader to the fantastical world of Earthsea, where dragons, wizards, witches, and a diverse group of people live together. While the wizards and dragons are immensely powerful, they worry about the equilibrium of the world and what it means to be a good adult.

This book is filled with adventures and hardships, which Le Guin covers superficially and everything sort of just resolves quickly and she moves on to other adventures, which is mostly the reason why this is not a 5-star book for me. The concepts and story is interesting enough, especially being that this was one of the first books to establish the boy-wizard going to wizard school. I enjoyed the philosophical reasonings of the older wizards as they attempted to teach young Ged. I would have liked more depth in character and in plot.


Regardless, this book has its place in the history of culture and the fantasy genre.

Quotes:

“From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”

“But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power...It must follow knowledge, and serve need.”

UHH I know this is a classic or whatever but I thought it was kind of boring. And I didn't really like Ged/Sparrowhawk. Hmm.

A very nice, very familiar book about a boy wizard's coming of age.

This is categorized as YA, but I think most teens would be bored by the slow pace and lack of action. It's a shame because it is a cool book with more philosophical depth than the average sword/sorcery fantasy novel is going to touch.

It was written in 1968 and as such, I can give it a lot of leeway. That's 15 years before David Eddings started his Belgariad, 20 years before Jordan started The Wheel of Time, and over 30 years before J. K. Rowling started the magical adventures of Harry Potter. I'm sure the book and its sequels would feel much more unique if not more successful followers.

It was also made into a moderately awful SyFy TV adaptation.

There was nothing new in this book for me. Themes I've encountered before and the same old uber-powerful hero. On top of it all, everything felt rushed. A bit of a disappointment, this one.

I need to catch up on my books on Vox. I read this a while back but never got around to posting about it. Matter of fact I don't recall that much about it. It follows the tale of a kid who becomes a wizard and goes to wizard school and unleashes an evil spirit and then has to beat said evil spirit.

To be honest, I didn't enjoy it that much at all. I probably would have enjoyed it when I was in my teens, but it was just a bit too formulaic and shallow for me. Perhaps it gets better as the series progresses. I don't really care though; book 1 didn't grab me enough to want to carry on.

This book has a good reputation, but it disappointed me. To me it reads like an exercise in fantasy writing: an exercise thoroughly completed, but lacking some vital spark. It's not a bad book, but I didn't find it convincing, and I'm not motivated to read the sequels.

It strikes me that Terry Pratchett's early Discworld books might have turned out quite like this—if his
sense of humour had been surgically removed in infancy. It's all rather solemn.

On finishing it, I found that I didn't care deeply about Ged, and I didn't understand why Escarriol/Vetch befriended him; he didn't seem a very appealing character.