A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin

The First Book of Earthsea

A Wizard of Earthsea is the story of the great wizard known as Sparrowhawk and his travels in the giant archipelago that is the world of Earthsea. Sparrowhawk gets himself in a mighty bit of trouble in an ill-advised act of pride while training as a wizard and spends much of the story dealing with the consequences.

I think of this book, and a few others like it, as a sort of bridge between fairy tales and the huge fantasy epics that are so alive and well today. It is short and to the point, but still stuffed with creative details. We may think of the elements of this story as typical (perhaps even cliché) for a “high fantasy” story, but that’s because they were in this one first, which influenced so many other stories to follow.

A Wizard of Earthsea is loaded with all the things I’ve always loved about fantasy stories, the things that made me a fantasy fanatic. There are wizards learning their craft as well as lessons about themselves. There is a fight with dragons and a seemingly impossible quest. And, of course, there’s plenty of magic: magical objects and magical places and magical practice. Of course it would be boring if every problem could be solved just with magic. Sparrowhawk, however, is also gifted with cleverness, tenacity, and strength, a good balance of abilities for a high fantasy hero.

While the action of the story moves quickly and is really enjoyable, what gives the novel an extra boost are the brilliant descriptive details. Here is an example from the beginning of the chapter titled “The Dragon of Pendor”:


West of Roke in a crowd between the two great lands Hosk and Ensmer lie the Ninety Isles. The nearest to Roke is Serd and the farthest is Seppish, which lies almost in the Pelnish Sea; and whether the sum of them is ninety is a question never settled, for if you count only isles with freshwater springs you might have seventy, while if you count every rock you might have a hundred and still not be done; and then the tide would change.


LeGuin is a beautifully gifted storyteller, and I have enjoyed whatever I’ve read that she has written. (I highly recommend the science fiction novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.) I’d love to give you a good explanation, or even an excuse, for why I had never read A Wizard of Earthsea before, but I don’t have one. Shame on me.


A Year of Books I Should Have Read By Now

Favorite Lines Friday

One Hundred Years of Solitude is loaded with great lines and perfect turns of phrase. Most of them seem to apply directly and uniquely to the town of Macondo and the Buendia family. There was one, however, that I believe applies well beyond the novel and to us all. Especially if you're someone who tends to lose your car keys.

[T]he search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.


Don't forget to look in the freezer.


Coming next: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa

After reading about a hundred pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, I began to worry that this book was going to kick my butt. I just didn’t know what it meant or what it was about. I decided, however, to just sit back and enjoy it as an ingeniously well-told story. I was rewarded.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of the Buendía family beginning with the founding of the city of Macondo by José Arcadio Buendía. There ensues a seemingly endless progression of sons and grandsons named José Arcadio and Aureliano that I couldn’t help but lose track of. I wasn’t really alone. Ursula, the family matriarch, as she reached an impossibly old age came to the conclusion that “time was going in a circle,” and “ ‘The years nowadays don’t pass the way the old ones used to,’ she would say, feeling that everyday reality was slipping through her hands.”

The stories of the Buendía family are characterized not only by a confusion of time, but also by gigantic improbabilities and impossibilities, dramatic courage and cowardice, impractically placed love, obsession, and at least a pinch of insanity. As for their relationships with each other, they are probably best characterized by the description of the relationship between the last José Arcadio and the final Aureliano: “That drawing closer together of two solitary people of the same blood was far from friendship, but it did allow them both to bear up better under the unfathomable solitude that separated and united them at the same time.”

This set of interwoven stories eddying through time is full of unnatural phenomena, unusual characters destined to be kept apart from each other, even in the same room, and ghosts who prove that “dominant obsessions can prevail against death.” The narrative style is so brilliant, so ingenious with such perfectly timed and metered phrases and perfectly chosen words that the unnamed and unembodied story-teller gains itself infinite credibility. I could be in the midst of this book and read, “It rained for four years, eleven months and two days,” or “and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room,” and believe it all without question.

This is the first time I’ve read anything by Gabriel García Márquez, and, while I was expecting greatness (he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982), I was left with an urge to bow down and chant, “I’m not worthy.” This is brilliance and I am in awe and I cannot even begin to understand how someone could put something like this novel together. I am ready to answer what it is about, however, at least for myself.

Whatever real scholars of literature may see or understand in this book that I do not, my mission is more of the armchair variety. I want to know why someone who just likes to read for personal enrichment or even leisure and fun would want to take the time to read this. I think I did the right thing from the beginning. I enjoyed the stories, the family history that “was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle,” for their own sake. And a story, especially one as phenomenally well-told as One Hundred Years of Solitude, should, no, needs to be savored and cherished for the simple reason that it is a story, “because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”


A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

A Newberry Award Medal Winner

There are too many books that I would probably have loved as a kid or teenager, but didn’t know about, couldn’t finish, or just didn’t bother to start. One of these books is A Wrinkle in Time. It has so many things that I should have loved as a youngster: science fiction, positive moral messages (without being preachy), misfit kids, and ethereal beings from other planets. I remember starting to read it, but I don’t know how old I was, and I didn’t finish. Oh, the great things I missed in my undisciplined youth!

In A Wrinkle in Time Meg Murry and her young, genius brother Charles Wallace, along with another boy named Calvin are dragged off by Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, mysterious beings of unknown origin with extraordinary abilities. They travel through space and time via tesseract, a sort of wormhole-like shortcut, in search of Meg’s father. They quickly learn that there is more at stake than Mr. Murry’s safety, and that a good fight against an evil force that would have all individualism extinguished is being waged across the universe.

And so, this is not just an adventure story, although it is well-written as such. It is also a story about individual freedom and the freedom to be an individual. “Maybe I don’t like being different, but I don’t want to be like everybody else, either,” Meg says toward the end of the book. She has been struggling against her school authorities and the people in her community who think she should be more like everyone else, and when she faces the enemy in the story, it’s her defense of her differences that allows her to prevail. I like Meg. She comes to the conclusion that “Like and equal are not the same thing at all,” at such a young age.

L’Engle has filled A Wrinkle in Time with many literary and classical references that would certainly have been lost on me as a young reader. The characters refer to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which I’m sure I didn’t read until I was in college, and Mrs. Who, who has trouble expressing herself so she quotes others, repeats lines from writers and speakers I wouldn’t have known until I was all grown up. These quotations and references work with the sociological and mathematical discussions to make this a rather intelligent work. I feel smarter just having read it now, and wish I had increased my intellectual sphere by finishing it and then rereading it several times in my pre-adult life.


A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now

Favorite Lines Friday

Early in the book Summer Knight by Jim Butcher, it is clear that the book's hero, Harry Dresden is suffering the ill effects of significant personal torment. (If you read Grave Peril, you can understand why.) At one point he is given some advice, a warning, perhaps, by Aurora, the Lady of the Summer Court of Faerie. I found this line particularly interesting since I had just read Wicked by Gregory Maguire where it would be equally at home.


Monsters are born of pain and grief and loss and anger.



Coming soon: my thoughts on A Wrinkle in Time by Madeliene L'Engle

Summer Knight by Jim Butcher

Book Four of the Dresden Files

When the first line of a novel is, “It rained toads the day the White Council came to town,” you might get an inkling that you’re in for a bumpy ride. And when it’s the ragamuffin wizard Harry Dresden narrating that line, you’re sure of it.

In Summer Knight, Harry, suffering the severe psychological backlash of the events in Grave Peril, finds himself at the epicenter of a complex set of overlapping conflicts involving the White Council (the wizards’ governing body, which is already full of people who distrust and hate him), a vampire war, and the courts of faerie. There’s also a murder mystery to solve and the return of someone he thought was dead. All in a few days’ work for the Chicago-based wizard for hire.

I really liked this story with its engaging language, reminiscent of the hard-boiled detective stories, fast-paced action, and entertaining characters. There were enough twists to keep me on my toes and enough danger and suspense to keep me frantically turning the pages (or pushing the buttons…I read this as and e-book.) I love Harry’s attitude, his stubbornness, strength and courage, the type of courage that is just on the other side of the fine line separating it from insanity.

As usual, Harry gets stuck in something so deep (um, literally) that it should be impossible for him to get out. He does get out, of course, and if you’re aware that there are more books in the series, I suppose that’s not such a surprise. Yes, he manages to be the awkward hero once again, this time with the aid of quite a motley assortment of allies, including his old friend Murphy from the Chicago police, a pack of young werewolves, a few changelings, and some seriously dangerous pixies led by the formidable Toot-Toot. In the end I was not only left still believing in Our Hero, Harry, but also the power of what is right and the power of true friendship born of respect. And the power of pizza.



You might also like Grave Peril, Book Three of the Dresden Files

A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now

Favorite Lines Friday

Much of Wicked by Gregory Maguire is a platform for discussing the nature of morality and immorality, good and evil. Here are some lines to ponder on the subject, spoken by the Wizard, who is making himself Emperor of Oz. I can’t say I agree with his assessment. But then again, I’m not a dictator…and it gives me something to think about.

“I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral,” said the Wizard. “In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged who love and fear the idea of moral life, it is the most hypocritical.”

and later…

“It is not for a girl, or a student, or a citizen to assess what is wrong. This is the job of leaders and why they exist.”

Yikes!!

And here are some words on anger, specifically “hot” (said to be held by men) versus “cold” (the realm of women) anger. They are spoken by Sarima, one of Elphaba’s ubiquitous “frenemies.”

“Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on – or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense.”

And after contemplating this and watching an icicle drip, Elphaba concluded the following about her own driving forces:

Warm anger and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.
       In a fashion - without any way to confirm it, of course - she had always felt as capable of hot anger as any man. But to be successful, one would need access to both sorts.


Spoiler alert: She then kills someone with that icicle.

Again, yikes!