Absolutely mandatory for any serious fantasy reader, a small, delightful gem in the midst of heaps and heaps of cheap trash. Instead, two reviews after the jump.Ī Wizard Of Earthsea is one of my favorite books regardless of genre. Peace, in Le Guin’s fictional world, is not reached by painstaking processes, but simply by the prophetic arrival of a King.īut I digress – I’m not going to write that essay. Interestingly, for a leftist author as Le Guin, her old man also returns home, accepting his mortality, to a world that is fundamentally changed for the better because it needed a Young New Leader. In this case, my heart goes out to Hemingway: his old man returns home, accepting the futility of his efforts, to a world that keeps spinning just as it did before. One could easily write a 50-page essay on similarities and differences, but the farther I’m removed from the literary sciences that dominated my early twenties, all I can think is: why would I?Īssuming Hemingway and Le Guin are authors positioned differently on the ideological spectrum, it could be a fun exercise to point out they share a lot of common ground, but in the end, doing that would also point out the relativity of such verbal heuristics – which ultimately most theorizing about culture is.

Both books explicitly offer supposedly deep insights on human nature, and humanity’s place in Nature. Both deal with old men in boats, old men trying to overcome negativity through perseverance. These books are related somewhat, I realized when I finished The Farthest Shore.

The earthsea quartet