So yesterday, I was on an airplane, and as usual, I had the map up on the screen for the whole flight. I always find it oddly satisfying to track the plane’s progress across the country. The green line that marks the plane’s journey is generally quite straight and smooth, though sometimes, at the end […]

Tales From Earthsea is a story collection, and some of the six stories in it are quite long, so I won’t be able to do a one-story-a-day thing. It’s going to have to be more of an as-many-pages-as-I-feel-like thing. We’ll see how that goes. I don’t really have any predictions for this one, as the […]

When I look back at the stuff I wrote twenty years ago, I do a lot of cringing. Luckily, this stuff is unpublished and likely to remain so. I haven’t yet reached the point where I have to cringe in retrospect at material that has been out in the wild for decades. In 1990, Ursula […]

Amazingly, I have kept to my one-chapter-of-Earthsea-a-day-except-for-a-couple-of-days-at-the-end-of-each-book pledge, and I’m already on the fourth book, Tehanu, about which I know very little. I’ve heard it described as “the book where Ursula K. Le Guin goes back to Earthsea and does it all again, only feminist,” so this should be interesting. The original Earthsea trilogy really is […]

If The Hobbit is basically Beowulf from the perspective of the thief who causes all the dragon problems, The Farthest Shore is Beowulf with a twist: though it ends with dragons, the dragons are helpful, whereas the real enemy is a human wizard. Tolkien lets the epic play out in the background of his novel while the thief and […]

I’ll be starting to read The Farthest Shore today. It’s thirteen chapters long, so I’ll do it over thirteen days. See the comments section of this post for my thoughts on each chapter. My ridiculous predictions for this book: There will be dragons. This is not a difficult prediction to make. We are going to return […]

Moving from the wide-open spaces of A Wizard of Earthsea into the claustrophic confines of The Tombs of Atuan is a bit like being buried alive, metaphorically speaking. Ursula K. Le Guin’s second Earthsea book makes a distinct contrast to her first. If A Wizard of Earthsea is all about dark mirror images, The Tombs of Atuan its its dark […]