beat up books: A Wizard of Earthsea

hmmm…

On Instagram I see people with beautiful piles of color coded books, shelves filled with pristine and lovely dustjackets. I do not have such books. I’m a voracious rereader of what I love and my love destroys the physical containers for gorgeous and evocative stories (even hardcovers!). To honor these amazing stories, I’m going to start highlighting my most beat up books, and tell you why they got that way: why do I love these stories, these writers?

Let’s start with this one, A Wizard of Earthsea, first book in the Earthsea Trilogy by one of my all-time favorite authors, Ursula K. LeGuin. My favorite book in the trilogy is actually Tombs of Atuan (book 2), with its female protagonist, but the picture here is Wizard since I have three copies of it. The one in the center is actually the one I’ve had since childhood, and I can practically guarantee you it wasn’t new when I got it. As an author it’s interesting for me to see how the story was marketed in the science fiction/fantasy pulp genre in the 1970s, trying to reposition something published as “children’s literature” by a small press as a horror story, or as something very freaky and strange involving green lights. I have no idea what that guy in the green seaweed is doing or why he’s there, but it just demonstrates that marketing can be…not what the author intended.

Because this is not at all a horror story, of course, nor is it, in my opinion, children’s literature. It’s a precisely told, haunting, and complex coming of age story, a young man discovering the magic he has inherited, making wrong decisions with it for wrong reasons, injuring himself and others, and seeking to make it right. It is beautiful in its lyric composition as well as its sparing but perfect descriptions of place and setting: the Archipelago; Sparrowhawk’s island home and the tiny impoverished village where he lived as an orphan; the school for wizards (LeGuin came up with it first!) which is not at all like Hogwarts except that it is made of stone and has a Great Hall; the endless sea where Sparrowhawk must confront his shadow. LeGuin created complex characters even within a very short compass, quite different from the sprawling epic fantasy style of Tolkien, but it is epic in the sense that her characters here, as in all her books, are always dealing with issues relevant to the greater world, difficult ethical choices, and challenges of cosmic significance.

It’s only now that I realize how much this particular book has influenced my writing. In the Earthsea novels, LeGuin created the idea of a “true name,” which has influenced a great deal of fantasy and a great many magic systems ever since, and which I use, in slightly different form, in the Crane Moon Cycle. Her approach to the world hints at a world-retreating version of Taoism, where a character argues that in order to preserve balance, the most powerful must do nothing at all; the more powerful one is, the more likely it is that action will destroy the natural balance of the world. This phrase struck me so strongly as a child that it remains with me to this day: not because I agree with it, but because some parts of it felt true, and some felt…not quite true…and I didn’t and don’t have a simple answer to its challenge. While this particular understanding of Taoism isn’t the only one, nor is this how I approach life and balance personally, LeGuin’s emphasis on maintaining and accepting the balance of reality, rather than engaging in all-out war against the parts of reality we don’t like, does strike me as both meaningful and important, and I see echoes of it in my own work.

Later in LeGuin’s life she added two additional books to the trilogy, which are quite different. They deal with the challenges that were left out of the original Earthsea books: family and children, partnership and its complications, gender, growing up, sexuality. This also strikes me as relevant to my own work, because after I completed the Crane Moon Cycle duology, I realized that the story was incomplete. The happy for now ending isn’t enough; these characters had only reached a simple stopping point. The end of those books was just a beginning.

What are some of the childhood — or adulthood! — books that have been most meaningful to you, and why?

For more on The Wizard of Earthsea and its publishing history and importance in the English fantasy genre, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wizard_of_Earthsea.

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