Earthsea

[altariel]

I went hunting for Earthsea fanfiction at the start of the year, after I reread the series (before reading the new ones). Found some today by daegaer here.



It's interesting that Tehanu is often seen as an attempt to re-engineer the earlier books, but I have a sneaking admiration for Le Guin in having the courage to revisit a set of books that made her name - and say where she got it wrong.

I also love the beauty that she finds in very small, intimate moments. There's a sentence in Tehanu that I just adore: "They made and ate their supper and cleared it away."

Comments

[altariel.livejournal.com]

You know, and I am almost embarrassed to admit this in a public forum (oh, what the hell, this is my LJ!), I never finished The Left Hand of Darkness. Started it, put it down, never got back to it. I don't doubt that I will at some point, I like Le Guin too much not to try again. Sometimes I'm just not receptive to books, no matter how I try - and then I can come back to them again much later, and they connect to something else that's going on in my head. (I'm also a very bad reader - I slip too quickly into skim-reading mode.)

So even though I've read and reread The Farthest Shore since childhood, I never connected the dots in it. When I reread the Earthsea books at the start of the year it suddenly connected up to a lot of other things, Pullman's books in particular, and made sense. I really can be extraordinarily dense at times.

(The Dispossessed I read and everything pinged all at once. I think that book is close to perfect.)

Have you ever read any of David Lodge's books? The parodies of academia (Small World, Changing Places)? In one of them, a group of English Lit academics play a dinner party game in which they have to admit to a Canonical Work that they have never read; one particular eminent person there admits to never having got through Hamlet. I feel a bit like that about The Left Hand of Darkness (well, and about a lot of other things too, I won't mention how little Shakespeare I've read... *g*).