“If women had power what would men be, but women who can’t bear children?” The earthsea quartet is four books that all follow Ged, known as Sparrowhawk, from his first feeble steps into magic, through his prideful youth, to a brave adulthood and then finally in his final years as Archmage of the wizard school on the island on Roke. “But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them. The Wizard of the Earthsea is the first book were we […]
Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.
This is the third of the Earthsea Cycle, which I assume is the earliest and primary trilogy in the world. This is from 1972, and less so than the previous two novel, but still plenty, this novel feels like it’s from 1972. What this means is that while it’s still very good, it’s so endemic of early fantasy novels. The scope of the novel’s plot outpaces it’s tone and size. It’s too big a story for a relatively short novel. I think about Middlemarch when it […]
Odds and Ends
Presumed Innocent: 4/5 Stars So I didn’t realize this was the same as the Harrison Ford movie until about halfway through the book. I picked it up for two distinct reasons: 1) It was listed as one of the best legal thrillers (old school, we’ll call it) and that reason checks out and 2) the audiobook was read by Edward Hermann, which is obviously great. I have heard him read one book before and it was so good. So the novel itself is told from […]
A sci-fi introspective on gender and human society
I’m not normally a sci-fi reader, but that was part of the reason I decided to give The Left Hand of Darkness a try: I had an audible credit to use, I wanted to give Le Guin another chance, and the description said this was a classic sci-fi title. I think because I’m not familiar with the genre, the difficulty I’d had with the age of A Wizard of Earthsea didn’t bother me as much here, even though it was originally published in 1969. Sometimes groundbreaking doesn’t […]