One thing is to read about dragons and another to know them
A Wizard of Earthsea is a classic fantasy. Initially conceived and marketed as a book for young people, it was soon discovered that it worked just as well for adult readers. It tells the story of how a boy with some innate magical abilities learns to become a powerful wizard. He has many flaws and to succeed, he must learn more than just casting spells. It is an adventure story set in an archipelago, an unusual theme. Le Guin tells us in her 2012 epilogue that when she wrote it (in 1968), she had fewer models and less competition in constructing a fantasy narrative than the flood of fantasy literature that emerged later. She had Tolkien and the Arthurian legends as a reference and was inspired to wonder what Gandalf and Merlin were like when they were young and what it cost them to learn what was needed to become wizards. What our young wizard learns is that what he thought was power was not really power and that his ability to do harm was greater than he believed. To defeat the malignant shadow he has conjured, he must face it and recognize it as his own. Five stars.

I must admit, I started the series with a bit of hesitation. Because magic, dragons, etc. have kind of bored me lately. Of course, it must have been a wonderful work in the period it was written, because it was new and pioneering. However, in the time that has passed, themes such as magic schools and the power of knowing someone's name have been imitated so much that... I was afraid I wouldn't like it and couldn't give it the value it deserved.

Fortunately, I was wrong. Yes, there were many opportunities to read and experience everything firsthand in the years when it was first published. But still, meeting Ged and Estarriol, witnessing the education at the magic school, and enjoying reading a name like Kurremkammeruk backwards was extremely nice. And of course, there's the rushwash tea... Even in someone like me who doesn't like tea, this name aroused great curiosity. (I understood it was rushwash in a flash, hehe!)

There were two scenes in the book that affected me the most. The first, of course, was the part where Ged fought the dragons and bargained with the ancient Yevaud. I think I will often repeat the line "With Yevaud by name..." in the rest of my life and shiver a little.

Another part that affected me was when Ged returned to his master Ogion's side years later and said, "I returned just as I left you, master, as a fool."

There are many such simple but powerful sentences in the book, and I think this is what makes Le Guin's narration effective. She tells with very simple but powerful sentences. The way of subduing the shadow, for example... Simple but unexpected and incredibly logical.

The only problem I had with the book was its abundance of commas. The editor didn't do a very good job in this regard. There is a comma everywhere (probably in the parts that are actually in English). Fortunately, you can ignore this when you read a paragraph and get caught up in the story. Of course, the contribution of Çiğdem Erkal İpek's successful translation cannot be ignored either. (What a name is Civanperçemi, my God?) And in the last few parts, I may have been a bit bored when they were sailing here and there :P

In short, I'm glad I read it so late, and I'm even calling the sequel books by their names!

A Wizard of Earthsea is an unusually enchanting classic. It has a simple form but a significant substance.

Written fifty years ago, it has been a source of inspiration for many coming-of-age stories and wizard schools. Before Hogwarts, there was the School on Roke where potential sorcerors learned powers like Summoning, Changing, Binding, and Patterning. Decades before Name of the Wind, the concept of the ultimate power around the mastery of Names existed.

Earthsea is a world of islands and archipelagos. Seafaring is common, and wizards, with their mage-wind, are great sailors and voyagers. Our protagonist, Sparrowhawk or Ged, was the son of a goatherder. Discovered to be powerful at a young age, he went to the School on Roke. Ged learned fast but was not perfect. An impetuous and arrogant youth, he unleashed an evil.

Despite being about Ged's growth into the most powerful sorcerer, there are no epic battles. Instead, the reader joins his personal journey of self-discovery. The classical narrative has an omniscient style, which made me less engaged. However, the simple scope gave an intimate sense of Ged's journey.

A Wizard of Earthsea is short by modern standards, with simple yet elegant writing. The brevity might explain the lack of engagement compared to today's fantasy novels. Nevertheless, fantasy fans can benefit from reading this influential work. It's also notable that the main protagonist has copper-brown skin, even before racial diversity was common in fiction.

This review can also be found at Booknest.

Fantasy the way fantasy is meant to be told.

This book is an old-school high fantasy epic. I vividly remember seeing it in the school library even when I was a kid. However, it took me quite a while to actually pick it up and start reading.

I truly enjoyed it. Ea or Earthsea has some unique world attributes. To me, it reads like PC Hodgell's work, especially her Kencyrath Chronicles which I love. It has a certain Tolkein-ish feel, but not exactly. What I mean by this is that the writing style wasn't as dense as that of LOTR. At the same time, it wasn't really "easy-reading" with simple and plain language either. It wasn't something you could just read mindlessly and zone out. You had to really think about what Le Guin was trying to convey. This kind of depth works well with fantasy, and I felt it did so perfectly in this book.

Another interesting aspect is that Sparrowhawk/Ged is a flawed character. Arguably, he is a pretty deeply flawed character who has to spend a significant part of his life rectifying the mistakes he made in his youth. And unfortunately, his youthful screw-ups had also messed up the world.

I really liked the ending. I hadn't expected the conflict to be resolved in such a nuanced way, which was really cool.

There are more books in this series, and I'm really looking forward to reading them soon.

On my re-read, I have come to the conclusion that this book is closer to a 4.5-star rating rather than a full 5 stars.

Admittedly, it's not a huge difference, but there are some aspects that prevent it from reaching that perfect score.

One area where the book lacks a bit is in world building. While it was one of the early fantasy stories in modern times, there is a vast and interesting world that remains not fully explored.

However, there are also many things that I absolutely loved about this book.

The world, which is based on a series of archipelagoes, is both beautiful and accessible.

The character of the otak was also a pleasant surprise, as I had forgotten he was part of the story.

This is truly a precious book of fantasy, a classic (if such a thing exists) fantasy tale.

It tells the story of a mage who discovers his true nature and must fight against himself and his fears to become a better version of himself.

The plot is nice and simple, straightforward and entertaining, making it easy to follow and enjoy.

The writing style is superb, impressive in its simplicity of delivery. The words used are of a refined palate, making it a true gem.

I dare say that this book feels like a family tale, one that can be shared with your loved ones. It also seems like a great book to recommend to those who are new to the world of fantasy or don't know much about it.

In conclusion, I loved this book and would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good fantasy story.

The first thing I want to talk about is the author of this series. The Earthsea Cycle, or its more complete name, The Wizard of Earthsea, consists of 6 books written by Ursula K. Le Guin between 1967 and 2001.

Note that, contrary to what is commonly misbelieved, the author of this series is a woman. And what's more interesting is that she is among the few ancient female authors of speculative fiction who has brought works of both fantasy and science fiction subgenres to the writing field.

And more importantly, I want to draw your attention to the year 1967 when the first book of this series, "A Wizard of Earthsea" or as it is named in Iran, "The Wizard", was published.

Tolkien's "The Hobbit" was published in 1937, and "The Fellowship of the Ring", the first volume of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, was published in 1954.

C.S. Lewis published the first book of the Narnia series, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", in 1956.

Famous authors like Robert Jordan, Robin Hobb, and other prominent authors of the classic fantasy and modern periods all started publishing their works after the 1990s.

So the importance of the matter here is clear that Ursula K. Le Guin is among the pioneering authors and is actually among the three-legged founders of the modern era of fantasy in the 20th century along with Tolkien and Lewis. In addition, she is also among the renowned authors of the Golden Age of science fiction.

Now let's talk about the Earthsea Cycle books themselves.

This series is always considered in the "High Fantasy" genre. And of course, being in this subgenre, you expect to encounter a special universe with different races, cultures, lands, and also magic, dragons, swords, the conflict between good and evil, and heroic battles. And I must say that this work will satisfy you in this regard.

But this series will also offer you something more than that, and this is the very thing that, in my opinion, makes reading Earthsea important.

This series, while having no shortage of heroic scenes, is not intended to keep the martial spirit of the lords of creation alive in your presence. While it takes you on adventures to strange lands, it is not intended to create the excitement and frenzy of Narnia in you. It is not like a fiery and icy melody, a bustling market of lurid political games, or like the Wheel of Time with its numerous varieties and types of strange characters. Rather, Earthsea has come to offer you a complete, elegant, deep, tragic, and poetic fantasy story with all the characteristics of a sword and magic tale.

This book gently delves into the existence of its characters, characters that are fully and beautifully developed and take you along with a magical, deep, and refined story full of meaning. And in my opinion, this is something that should happen at least once for every fan of genre literature and they should have the experience of reading such a genre book at least once in their reading life.

I would also like to say from my own side that during the 30 years that I have read genre books, I have selected a set of characters as my favorite characters, sometimes thinking about them and the events that happen to them. And one of the very beloved characters on my list, among the top three, is a character from Earthsea named "Ged". If you read the book, you will soon become familiar with his heroic and heartbreaking story.

A Wizard of Earthsea must have been truly revolutionary when it was initially published in 1968.

Here was a fantasy novel that not only had a non-white protagonist but was also written by a woman. Back then, such a combination was as scarce as hen's teeth.

Although the story may seem rather familiar in today's context, it has had an enormous influence on generations of fantasy writers.

The narrative centers around a boy named Ged, who showcases remarkable skill in the realm of magic from a tender age.

During his studies to become a wizard, a spell goes horribly awry, unleashing a shadow creature that attacks him.

The remainder of the story chronicles Ged's endeavors to挣脱 the creature's grip.

It's quite easy to surmise what the shadow represents early on. However, that doesn't detract from the many other aspects that are worthy of praise.

There's the strange and enchanting world that Le Guin envisions, the thrill of a young man from modest beginnings realizing his true potential, and his coming-of-age journey filled with numerous obstacles.

Even all these years later, it's still a genuine delight to read, and I can clearly understand why Margaret Atwood has described it as one of the wellsprings of fantasy literature.

I'm truly amazed that I happened to miss reading this series during my youthful days. However, I'm extremely glad that I've now rectified that error.

This is a wonderful young adult fantasy that delves deep into the themes of hubris and the process of making amends. Ged and his friends are simply unforgettable, and the imaginative world crafted by LeGuin is equally captivating. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect is that her world is filled to the brim with races of every conceivable shade and cultures spanning every level, from the most primitive to the highly sophisticated.

I'm excitedly looking forward to embarking on further adventures within Ged's world.

(Reviewed 4/22/18)

I am truly captivated by Le Guin's remarkable ability to immerse readers in an entire culture with her sweeping minimalist style.

She manages to paint a whole world on her canvas with fewer words than most authors, and with very little dialogue.

Many of the characters in her work are wizards, who are often brooding and deeply aware of the burdens that come with the knowledge they possess.

These wizards do not often speak, adding an air of mystery and depth to their characters.

The plot of her work can be summarized in two ways.

One way is through a rather trite and overused cliche about self-mastery.

However, the true charm of the work lies in the fact that Ged is both a villain and the victim of even deadlier villainy.

It is through the help of a true friend that he is able to achieve victory over both, making for a complex and engaging story.

Le Guin's use of language and her unique storytelling style make her work a must-read for any lover of fantasy literature.

¡Qué bellísimo libro! Esta obra es verdaderamente asombrosa. La oralidad utilizada como recurso narrativo es una belleza en sí misma. Nos permite sumergirnos en una historia de manera más inmediata y vívida, como si estuviéramos escuchando a alguien contar directamente. Además, la manera en que se introduce la filosofía del lenguaje es simplemente preciosa. Se presenta de una forma accesible y fascinante, haciéndonos reflexionar sobre el poder y la importancia del lenguaje en nuestra vida cotidiana y en la construcción de la realidad. Cada párrafo y cada frase parecen estar meticulosamente elaborados para transmitir una idea profunda y a la vez cautivar al lector. Es un libro que no solo entretiene, sino que también enriquece nuestra mente y nuestra percepción del mundo.

Note, March 3, 2022: I've just edited this to correct one minor error -- Barb and I first read this in the early, not late 80s.

Although this fantasy novel, written for YA readers, was published in 1968 and received considerable acclaim from the outset, even from the critical establishment (they considered fantasy acceptable as long as it was kept in its supposedly proper place, "for kids"), it escaped my radar at the time. Back in my high school days, I hadn't discovered the fantasy genre. My first reading of the book didn't happen until the early 80s, when I was in my thirties; it became my first introduction to Le Guin's work. Barb and I read it together and liked it. But like many pre-Goodreads reads, I'd never reviewed it here, and by now had forgotten enough of it that I knew I'd never be able to do it justice. We decided to reread it this past summer, finishing today, and mostly experienced it afresh, though I could remember bits and pieces. (This 2012 reprint has a roughly seven-page Afterword by the author, which I also read and will interact with more below.)

Born into a well-to-do, privileged family in 1929 (her father was an anthropology professor highly regarded in his field, a background which gave her an interest in cultural anthropology that enriches a number of her writings, including this one), Le Guin began writing for adults in the late 50s, focusing on science fiction, but also producing some fantasy. And she had read in the latter genre for much of her reading life, including the LOTR saga which she references in her Afterword. By the time a publisher encouraged her to try writing a YA novel and suggested fantasy as the genre, she'd already created her fictional world of Earthsea in a couple of short stories, including "The Rule of Names" which I read a few years after reading this book. That became the setting here.

Tolkien's influence shows here in places. We have a large fantasy world that's provided with a map, a suggestion of a prior history stretching back into the dim past, and references to an Old Language and (fictitious) old writings written both before and after the events of this tale. And the depiction of dragons follows Tolkien's model. Like Middle Earth, it's a low-tech place with a roughly medieval level of technology. The "coming of age" motif that bulks so large in YA fiction is another source of influence, and this book fits very much into that tradition. But Le Guin also displays significant originality. Wizard figures in earlier fantasy tended to be depicted as elderly men; but since she was writing for teens, she chose to make her wizard protagonist a teen, and also created the genre's first depiction of a training school for wizards. (This undoubtedly influenced J. K. Rowling's creation of Hogwarts -- and Le Guin, who lived until 2018, expressed her dissatisfaction with critic's praise for the latter's originality, and with Rowling's supposed failure to sufficiently acknowledge her indebtedness. Though Rowling made the school setting central to her whole seven-book saga, where here it occupies only two out of ten chapters, and Hogwarts is coed, where Le Guin's wizards, and the faculty and student body at their school, are all male.) Earthsea is a highly distinctive world in that it's mostly water; humans inhabit a variety of islands on one side of it, and know nothing of any other lands. And most of its people, including protagonist Ged and most of the important characters here, are non-white, being brown or black, which was groundbreaking in the genre. Contrary to Le Guin's claim in the Afterword, this isn't presented in a "sneaky" fashion to fool the "racist" teen readers; she did use a stealth technique in The Left Hand of Darkness, where we don't learn that the protagonist is black until we're well into the book, but here the contrast between the white Kargs and Ged's darker skinned people is explicit in the first chapter.

Unlike the LOTR saga, the central conflict here doesn't involve a war. There's a significant element of moral choice and growth, physical danger and need for physical courage, and eventually a quest motif that fits very much into the literary fantasy tradition and its oral antecedents. But there's no over-arching war between an evil power seeking to dominate the world and those who resist it, as there is in Tolkien's trilogy and the many subsequent works directly influenced by it. In her Afterword, Le Guin gives herself considerable praise for this, implying that it was a unique departure from previous genre tradition, stereotyping the good vs. evil war motif as simplistic "us against them" garbage ("puerile, misleading, and degrading"), and dismissing fantasy heroes in that mold as morally indistinguishable from the villains, since violence is inherently BAAAAAD. In contrast, she asserts, "there are no wars in Earthsea." The first obvious problem there is that there ARE bloody ethnic raids and piratical operations in Earthsea, and Ged's first showing of his mettle is in conjuring a fog to blind the invaders of his village in one such raid. If these aren't "wars," they're reasonable facsimiles, and they leave dead bodies and burned buildings that are just as dead and burned as they'd be if somebody had used the w-word. (And the victims of these aggressions probably don't have philosophical objections to violent defense against them.) A second problem is that Le Guin exaggerates both the pervasiveness of war motifs in pre-1968 fantasy, and the supposed moral simplicity, one-sided moral portrayals and glorification of killing in the Tolkien tradition. But it's not fair to judge this novel for an Afterword written 44 years later.

On its own merits, this is a highly well-conceived, capably written fantasy, with a style and diction that's perfectly adapted to the author's intention. Le Guin's system of magic is coherently thought out, revolving around the use of language and especially the power of the essential "true names" of people and things, a concept the author borrowed from actual folklore, where it appears in a number of world cultures. (This is all "natural," incantational magic; as a professed atheist, Le Guin was unsympathetic to the idea of invocational magic, that tries to conjure the aid of personal supernatural powers, demonic or divine.) Her messaging is, obviously, not conceived in Christian terms (and is noticeably influenced by her professed Taoism, which is a philosophy neither theistic nor atheistic in itself); but it's not inherently anti-Christian or anti-moral. On the contrary, it is essentially moral, with strong encouragement of responsibility, loyalty, and concern for others. Unlike one reviewer, I found the characters well-developed and relatable -- Ged isn't likable in the beginning, but the point is that he grows. I'd definitely recommend this to genre fans of all ages.

Well, this book definitely ranks as one of the most undeserving fantasy works that have received critical acclaim, in my opinion.

Even though I haven't read it for a while, and my comments might seem unfair because of this, I truly just detested this book. It was extremely baffling to me how such great potential for a story could be so brutally squandered.

LeGuin could have written an internationally-known bestseller, but instead, she chose to pen a singularly uninteresting account of a wizard named Ged, who is astonishingly boring. Her prose was "stuffy", for lack of a better word. Her characters were one-dimensional and not in the slightest endearing. And her overall story-line was lacking in colour and quality.

The shadow, for example, is never really explained to us, the readers, why it's so bad and so feared. It's simply a thing to be feared without understanding, the worst type of villain.

It's the usual bildungsroman, the quest, the journey to find one's sense of self. However, that being said, it simply did not capture my heart as a good story should do to one. It failed to engage me on an emotional level and left me feeling disappointed and unfulfilled.